NFR Security Offers AOL IM Package to Protect Enterprise Networks

Oct. 14, 2004
NFR Security announced the availability of a new network security protection package for AOL Instant Messaging

ROCKVILLE, Md -- NFR Security, Inc., a leader in Intrusion Defense and Management, announced the availability of a new network security protection package for AOL Instant Messaging (AIM) to further enhance the company's Sentivist product. This application protection package is compatible with Sentivist's inline intrusion prevention solution and meets FDIC guidelines for identifying and protecting against risks associated with instant messaging. With advanced signature, protocol analysis, and logging capabilities, this new package enables enterprises to identify threats, prevent attacks and secure their networks against the rise of security vulnerabilities that accompany instant message applications.

"Enterprises are implementing applications such as instant messaging to increase the productivity of their employees through instant communication. This results in an escalated demand for application level security tools to address new holes and vulnerabilities on the network," said Pete Lindstrom, Research Director of Spire Security. "NFR Security is addressing security at the application level to ease the enterprise burden of protecting against those application oriented threats."

NFR Security's Sentivist AIM package provides customers with a high level of traffic analysis and logging capabilities to prevent attacks against the Instant Messaging application as well as those attacks using IM as the vehicle to launch an attack (much like email is used to spread a worm). The logging capabilities are highly customizable, allowing IT managers to log file transactions, chat conversations or both. In addition, NFR Security's Sentivist intrusion prevention solution will work with the AIM package and offers a unique patent-pending feature called Confidence Indexing(tm), which allows intrusion prevention decisions to be configured by the user based on the risk profile of the organization.

"Applications such as Instant Messaging and VoIP are evolving into the latest enterprise communication tools for customers. Each new tool brings new flavors of security vulnerabilities and threats which the enterprise must protect," said Andre Yee, president and CEO of NFR Security. "NFR Security is securing these emerging applications by adding a critical layer of defense that analyzes traffic, alerts administrators of suspicious activity and prevents attacks on the fly."

NFR Security's Sentivist provides organizations with accurate attack prevention at both the perimeter and at the application level. The system is built on the company's hybrid engine that gives users the most advanced methods for identifying and preventing known and unknown attacks, including advanced signatures, protocol anomaly, state tracking and data context analysis. Sentivist also allows users the flexibility to customize existing signatures and create new ones, including specific applications like Voice over IP, Instant Messaging, peer-to-peer. In addition to unique features such as Confidence Indexing, the product also offers high-availability, including the first fail-over capability on fiber-optic networks, white and blacklist capabilities and minimal impact design. Sentivist supports attack prevention in distributed environments in both small and large scale enterprises.