Press Releases

Industry’s First 8 Gigabit Intrusion Prevention Solution with Unmatched Protection and Reliability

Attack Mitigator IPS 5500 Enables Highly Scalable Stateful Intrusion Prevention; Delivers Superior Performance and Protection at Multi-Gigabit Speeds in a Compact Footprint

Westboro, MA, November 01, 2004 -

Top Layer Networks (www.TopLayer.com), a provider of globally proven intrusion prevention solutions, today announced the industry’s first Intrusion Prevention System (IPS) capable of providing reliable, non-stop protection at eight gigabits per second (Gbps) with significant enhancements including support for networks that require asymmetric traffic handling. The Attack Mitigator IPS 5500 ProtectionCluster^TM is available immediately for enterprises and service providers that need multi-gigabit protection from today’s cyber threats.

“Today’s cyber attacks are becoming increasingly more creative and intense, with numerous vulnerabilities allowing malicious code to strike through any number of means,” said Mike Paquette, vice president of technology at Top Layer Networks. “Companies are demanding reliable, effective protection at increasingly higher speeds and most solutions on the market can’t match those network demands. However, the Attack Mitigator IPS 5500 ProtectionCluster^TM is now available to ensure customers have the highest level of non-stop protection at the highest levels of performance.”

Through intelligent load sharing, the Attack Mitigator IPS 5500 ProtectionCluster^TM solution provides the highest levels of performance and reliability using unique mechanisms for sharing load and providing scalable protection. Top Layer’s Attack Mitigator IPS 5500 ProtectionCluster^TM shares state information across dedicated Gigabit High Availability (HA) links, providing better protection through more insight into conversations. Top Layer’s solution is unique in that it provides the only solution that can still process 4Gbps worth of traffic even in the event of a single device failure. This shared configuration provides better reliability and ensures that a device failure does not disrupt business continuity.

“Effective network intrusion prevention must be inline, perform at the rated throughput without packet loss, and have acceptable performance even when handling a variety of packet sizes,” said Greg Young, a research director with Gartner. “Performance with minimal latency, the backing of good research and updates, a clear configuration and management interface, and predictable behavior under load are some of the essential elements of IPS.”

High Performance at Multi-Gigabit Speeds

The Attack Mitigator IPS 5500 ProtectionCluster^TM maintains full protection capabilities even when handling asymmetric traffic. This is critical for business operations that balance traffic across two routers for better network performance and reliability. With this topology, security devices often have difficulty maintaining connection state information since a conversation may be initiated through one device, but subsequent packets come in via the second device. In this complex network topology, Top Layer’s IPS 5500 ProtectionCluster^TM is the only solution to maintain full stateful protection capabilities through our intelligent stateful load sharing. More state information provides better protection. Most other solutions don’t employ full-time stateful inspection; when handling asymmetric traffic, other solutions must completely “dumb down” their protection to simple packet filtering due to architecture and performance limitations. Competing solutions can provide high-performance reliability only by severely exposing an organization’s critical assets to devastating attacks.

“E-Commerce companies rely on the Internet to make a living, and as such are the target of numerous types of cyber threats, attacks and even extortion attempts,” said Barrett Lyon, CTO of Prolexic Technologies. “If these companies are offline for any period of time, their customers take their transactions elsewhere and they lose business. Top Layer’s Attack Mitigator IPS 5500 family has the performance and features to keep pace with real-world user traffic and network environments, detect embedded security threats and eliminate them where other products are not as fast or efficient.”

Top Layer’s IPS 5500 offers the best network-level and application-level protection from cyber threats including undesired access, malicious content (viruses, worms, Trojans and other remote exploits), and rate-based attacks (DoS, DDoS and other Flood attacks). Top Layer’s IPS 5500 solution has been uniquely designed to defend against not only known threats but also provide protection from newly discovered “zero-day” exploits. In addition Top Layer provides the capability to protect against rate-based attacks effectively through rate-based controls.

About the Attack Mitigator IPS 5500

The Attack Mitigator IPS 5500 family offers the strongest levels of protection, performance and reliability on the market today. By improving upon the most powerful characteristics of stateful firewall technology and intrusion detection systems, Top Layer has developed the IPS 5500 in order to protect against attacks real-time with minimal interruption of legitimate traffic. Top Layer executes high performance, non-disruptive deep packet inspection and analysis coupled with intelligent blocking of attacks through TopFire™ second-generation ASIC technology and TopInspect™ Deep Packet Inspection.

For more information on The Attack Mitigator IPS 5500 ProtectionCluster^TM, please contact sales@TopLayer.com, or call 508-870-1300.

For more information on Top Layer's network Intrusion Prevention System Solution please visit http://www.toplayer.com/content/products/intrusion_detection/attack_mitigator.jsp

For Intrusion Prevention System case studies visit http://www.toplayer.com/content/resource/case_studies.jsp

For Intrusion Prevention white papers visit http://www.toplayer.com/content/cm/whitePaperList.jsp

About Top Layer Networks, Inc.

Founded in 1997, Top Layer Networks (http://www.TopLayer.com) develops network security solutions that enable enterprises worldwide to protect their infrastructure and critical online assets from cyber threats. The Company’s patented, ASIC-based products are engineered to deliver accurate and reliable protection mechanisms while operating as robust in-line network security devices. Top Layer Networks is headquartered in Westboro, Massachusetts with sales and support presence in Canada, France, Germany, Japan, Korea, the Netherlands and the United Kingdom.

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