WatchGuard Announces Updates to Firebox X Security Appliance Family

WatchGuard’s Firebox X Unified Threat Management Appliances Receive Boosts to Fortify Reliability and Enhance Ease of Use

New Delhi - August 31, 2007 – WatchGuard® Technologies, Inc., a leading provider of firewall appliances and unified threat management (UTM) solutions, announced today that it has released appliance software updates that will give a boost to its Firebox® X e-Series product family, geared toward fortifying reliability and enhancing ease of use. Customers of WatchGuard’s Firebox® X Core™ and Peak™ security appliances will benefit from the release of Fireware® 9.1, providing features such as a spam quarantine, a new POP3 proxy, anti-virus scanning, and inbound server load balancing. Customers of the WatchGuard Firebox X Edge e-Series line of UTM network appliances will benefit from the release of the Edge 8.6 appliance software, providing a host of upgrades – including such features as enhanced wireless security, WAN failover to a serial modem, PPTP remote user support, SMTP support, and improved centralised management and reporting.

"WatchGuard is committed to providing our customers with industry-leading security appliances that are impenetrable and provide the highest reliability, along with the best ease of use in their class,” said Joe Wang, CEO of WatchGuard Technologies. “Through these latest updates, WatchGuard customers will benefit by gaining access to new features aimed at improving overall performance and reliability, whilst enhancing the ease of use in our products’ management capabilities. WatchGuard will continue to deliver products aimed at giving our customers strong, reliable UTM security appliances.”

The Firebox X Core and Firebox X Peak Updates

Designed to provide the best in business security for mid- to large-sized businesses, the Firebox X Core and Firebox X Peak appliances are receiving a software boost, adding new capabilities that increase the appliances’ performance and reliability. WatchGuard’s Fireware 9.1 introduces a robust set of function enhancements and management features to give network administrators more options for managing the security of their installations.

Fireware 9.1 adds to an already-robust UTM solution. With an all-new quarantine capability for spamBlocker, virus scanning for FTP and POP3 traffic, and unlimited file size scanning for AV, WatchGuard’s UTM appliances deliver robust best-of-breed functionality. The release of Fireware 9.1 for the Firebox X Core and Firebox X Peak appliances enables the following features:

§ Spam Quarantine – Users of the spamBlocker security service subscription can create a safe, full-featured quarantine for spam, bulk mail, and suspect email messages. Granular control allows the system administrator to configure preferences for mail disposition, storage allocations, and other parameters.

§ New POP3 Proxy – Fireware 9.1 introduces a POP3 proxy, protecting POP3 users against multitudes of new and unknown email-borne threats –delivering true zero-day protection.

§ Unlimited File Size Scanning for AntiVirus – A new anti-virus scanning engine eliminates limits on the size of attachments and downloads scanned for viruses with the optional Gateway AV/IPS subscription.

§ AV Scanning for FTP – WatchGuard users running Fireware 9.1 and the optional Gateway AV/IPS security service subscription can now apply AV scanning to all inbound and outbound files transferred via FTP – adding granular defense against many different types of malware to the true zero-day protection already present in the FTP proxy.

§ Inbound Server Load Balancing – Many companies use multiple internal servers to host a web or e-commerce site. Server load balancing allows the Firebox to distribute requests for a company’s URL or other public-facing content to a “server farm” or group of servers. Multiple algorithms offer tailored traffic distribution to the specific server environment. Fireware 9.1 also detects server outages and automatically routes requests to the remaining servers until the offline server is back online.

§ Firebox X550e Model Upgradeability – Upgrade the capacity and performance on the Firebox X550e via a license key to equal the capacity and performance of the standard 750e and 1250e models, but with 4 Ethernet ports rather than 8. This allows an organisation to adapt and expand, scaling their security needs upwards as their business grows.

Firebox X Core appliances are ideal for medium-sized businesses and are capable of 300+ Mbps firewall throughput. Firebox X Peak appliances can support larger enterprise solutions with 2.0 Gbps firewall throughput. Both appliance lines and their associated security service subscriptions offer complete UTM solutions including anti-virus, anti-spyware, anti-spam, intrusion prevention, and URL filtering

Firebox® X Edge Update

Designed for branch offices and businesses with up to 50 users, the Firebox X Edge is receiving a significant boost with the Edge 8.6 appliance software release. The Edge 8.6 update includes a bevy of new features that increase business reliability, improve network security management, and increase security. The release of Edge 8.6 appliance software for the Firebox X Edge enables the following features:

Enhanced Default Threat Protection – New protocols have been added to the proactive intrusion prevention engine allowing Edge 8.6 to detect and block attacks such as Syn Flood, Distributed Denial of Service (DDoS), and the attack known as the “Ping of Death,” aimed at crashing the target computer and/or subsequent network.

§ Robust VPN Failover – Edge 8.6 provides complete VPN failover functionality, providing constant connectivity to remote networks via VPN tunnels. In the event of a primary remote gateway failure, VPN connections will seamlessly switch to a secondary gateway connection and remain up between the two connection points. Once the primary gateway connection becomes available again, VPN traffic will automatically switch back to the primary connection.

§ WAN Failover with Serial Modem – Edge 8.6 can utilise an external modem through the serial port for failover to a dial-up connection. Now networks like a retail store or POS location can temporarily fail over to a dial-up connection in the event that their main broadband connection is down, and immediately switch back to the faster connection as soon as it is available again.

§ Enhance QoS Support – Responding to the demands of the increasing adoption of time-sensitive services such as Voice over IP (VoIP) and video conferencing, the Edge 8.6 gives system administrators the ability to prioritise traffic to provide maximum throughput to more critical traffic, and mark the priority of outgoing traffic to ensure prioritisation by other upstream systems.

§ Enhanced Security for Business Mail Servers – Edge 8.6 expands on its POP3 traffic scanning ability by adding an SMTP proxy to scan inbound email traffic for customers who host their own email with internal SMTP servers. Administrators can control attachment types, hide internal domain information, and deploy optional spamBlocker and Gateway AV/IPS to protect internally hosted email from spam, spyware, viruses, and many other threats and nuisances.

§ WPA2 Wireless Encryption – Edge 8.6 is now compatible with the WPA2 wireless encryption standard in addition to WEP and WPA standards already supported for greater interoperability and security on the customer’s wireless network.

§ Secure Remote User Access over PPTP – Edge 8.6 appliance software now supports up to 10 remote PPTP client connections, providing an inexpensive alternative to the IPSec protocol for Microsoft® Windows® users, for a secure connection for remote users to a corporate network.

§ MAC Address Lockdown – Edge 8.6 now allows administrators to grant or deny wired and wireless network access based on Ethernet MAC (Media Access Control) addresses, to bar users with unauthorised devices from gaining access to network resources.

§ Custom Proxy Configuration – Edge 8.6 offers enhanced flexibility by allowing users to inspect and secure outgoing HTTP and POP3 traffic on non-standards ports.

§ Enhanced Security for IPSec Tunnels –Edge 8.6 now supports IKE (Internet Key Exchange) peers using AES 128-, 192-, and 256-bit encryption and DH Group 5 key transaction, for enhanced security and interoperability in communication-sensitive business information over IPSec and VPN tunnels.

§ 3rd Party Certificate-based Authentication – Now Edge 8.6 administrators can use digital certificates from popular sources such as RSA®, VeriSign®, Entrust®, Microsoft, and others, for authentication of VPN tunnels or for general Internet access, or administrative access to the Edge management user interface.

§ WSM Reporting Enhancements – Edge 8.6 now provides rich historical reporting for administrators who use WatchGuard System Manager, offering statistics on threats processed and blocked through Gateway AV/IPS, WebBlocker, and spamBlocker – providing summary and detail visibility into network and security events, user behaviours, and more.

§ Edge Web GUI Reporting – New intuitive ways to monitor viruses, spam, intrusions, and content filtering are now available through the Firebox X Edge Web Manager 8.6. For users who subscribe to any WatchGuard optional security subscriptions, detailed statistics of threats processed and blocked are automatically recorded. Easy access is available under new tabs in the interface and the data is displayed in easily understood tables and graphs.

§ SNMP Monitoring – Support for Simple Network Management Protocol (SNMP) monitoring has been added in Edge 8.6, giving users the ability to monitor various system parameters from popular SNMP applications such as HP OpenView, IBM Tivoli, or open source packages. Edge 8.6 supports SNMP v2 and v3, for enhanced security and functionality.

Firebox X Edge appliances are aimed at businesses with up to 50 users, and are ideal for branch offices, as well as single-site businesses.

Pricing and Availability

WatchGuard Firebox X Edge e-Series UTM security appliances start at US$480 for the wired model and US$580 for the wireless version. UTM bundles for the Edge start at US$699. These products are available through WatchGuard reseller channels worldwide beginning today.

WatchGuard Firebox X Core e-Series appliances with Fireware 9.1 start at US$1,459. UTM bundles for Core appliances start at US$1,999. WatchGuard Firebox X Peak e-Series UTM security appliances start at US$5,900. UTM bundles for Peak appliances start at US$9,299. These products will be available through WatchGuard resellers worldwide starting September.

About WatchGuard Technologies Inc.
Since 1996, WatchGuard has been providing reliable, easy-to-manage security appliances to hundreds of thousands of businesses worldwide. Our Firebox X family of unified threat management (UTM) solutions provides the best combination of strong, reliable, multi-layered security with the best ease of use in its class. All products are backed by LiveSecurity® Service, a ground-breaking support and maintenance programme. WatchGuard is a privately owned company, headquartered in Seattle, Washington, and has its Asia-Pacific regional headquarters in Singapore, with other offices in Hong Kong, Mumbai, Seoul, Shanghai, Sydney and Tokyo. For more information, please visit www.watchguard.com.

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Certain statements in this press release, including statements about expected new products, services, features or functionality and other statements about our plans, objectives, intentions and expectations are “forward-looking statements” within the meaning of the Securities Exchange Act of 1934, as amended. Forward-looking statements are based on the opinions and estimates of management at the time the statements are made and are subject to known and unknown risks and uncertainties and inaccurate assumptions that could cause actual results to differ materially from those expected or implied by the forward-looking statements. Our actual results could differ materially from those anticipated in the forward-looking statements for many reasons, including the risk that expected new products, services, features or functionality are not available when expected or at all and the other risks described under “Risk Factors” in our quarterly report on Form 10-Q for the quarter ended March 31, 2006, and in our Securities and Exchange Commission filings from time to time. Readers are cautioned not to place undue reliance upon these forward-looking statements, which speak only as of the date of this release.

WatchGuard, LiveSecurity, Fireware, Core, Peak, and Firebox are either registered trademarks or trademarks of WatchGuard Technologies, Inc. in the United States and/or other countries. All other trademarks are the property of their respective owners.

Media Contact:

Milton Singh / Aman Chopra
finesse PR
+91-11-43056200
Milton@finessepr.com / aman@finessepr.com

Aman Chopra
Account Executive
finesse PR - the communication & people consultancy
181, Anand Vihar, Pitampura
Delhi 110034, INDIA
Telefax +91 11 43056200 (30 Lines)
Direct +91 11 43056212, Mob: 09891669322
mail: aman@finessepr.com
URL: www.finessepr.com

About WatchGuard Technologies Inc.
Since 1996, WatchGuard has been providing reliable, easy-to-manage security appliances to hundreds of thousands of businesses worldwide. Our Firebox X family of unified threat management (UTM) solutions provides the best combination of strong, reliable, multi-layered security with the best ease of use in its class. All products are backed by LiveSecurity® Service, a ground-breaking support and maintenance programme. WatchGuard is a privately owned company, headquartered in Seattle, Washington, and has its Asia-Pacific regional headquarters in Singapore, with other offices in Hong Kong, Mumbai, Seoul, Shanghai, Sydney and Tokyo. For more information, please visit www.watchguard.com.

This release was published on openPR.