Author: Eva Glass

Patrick Sweeney, executive director of network security at Dell, talked about next generation firewalls and how the world+dog needs them because of increased security threats.

He said Dell processed 50,000 pieces of malware a day and that means 50,000 new counter measures a day too – with updates to its firewalls pushed out between eight and twelve times a day. Mobility is changing and is being compromised – it’s not just the enterprise. Security from little to large companies all face the same problems and threats.

There’s an increase in criminal to criminal activities, with exploit auction houses, and people offering a distribution service as well as Botnet rental.  The biggest companies in the world and many governments have been badly compromised.

Encryption is used offensively by malware designers which makes it hard to defend networks. Algorithms to defend against these threats must be able to cope with encrypted malware too. Defence has to be at multiple levels, including deep packet inspection to filter content, offer anti-spam, SSL inspection, intrusion protection and others.

Dell has introduced several new features to its SonicWALL offerings including new content filtering policies that are downloaded when people are on the road – an enforced client deployment mode for CFS and AV. Application control is important too, so that highly threatening applications are prevented from being runnable on the network.