Fortinet Introduces New FortiWeb 5 OS

Fortinet, a global high-performance network security service provider has introduced the next-generation operating system (OS) for its FortiWeb Web application firewalls product family, providing important new security advancements to protect against increasingly malicious application layer attacks. The new FortiWeb 5 OS, which is backward compatible with the entire FortiWeb family, features critical security advancements that include the ability to accurately identify the origin of Web application traffic to proactively distinguish between legitimate and malicious sources.

FortiWeb provides the ability to distinguish between legitimate known search engine requests, scanners, crawlers and other threshold based tools. This expands the bot identification and analysis coverage recently introduced with the FortiGuard IP Reputation service, which monitors IPs that are compromised or behaving abnormally.

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In conjunction with the FortiWeb 5 rollout, Fortinet is also introducing three new Web application firewall appliances: the FortiWeb-3000D, FortiWeb-3000DFsx and FortiWeb-4000D, which are designed for large enterprises, service providers and large datacentres that require high performance Web application security. The FortiWeb-3000D and FortiWeb-3000DFsx support up to 1.5 Gbps of throughput while the FortiWeb-4000D supports up 4 Gbps. The new appliances are 50 to 100 percent faster than their predecessors and provide robust protection against the Open Web Application Security Project (OWASP) Top 10 risks and aid in PCI DSS 6.6 compliance.

Because today’s Web applications are being accessed and/or targeted by automated scripting tools, scans, search engines and unknown or malicious sources, security administrators need to quickly and easily identify those sources and traffic types. This is critical to distinguish good and bad traffic types and sources. FortiWeb technology now provides a graphical dashboard to easily spot and track bot traffic trends.

Moreover, the need to protect against application layer DoS attacks is increasingly important given the precipitous rise in attacks on application resources. This is in stark contrast to hackers’ previous focus on disrupting network bandwidth. FortiWeb 5 expands the previously released challenge response mechanism that distinguishes legitimate Web application requests from automated DoS tools to support in multiple different policies, providing better flexibility and granularity.

And as datacentres continue their ongoing transition from IPv4 to IPv6, the need to provide bi-directional support between the two communications protocols is essential to maintaining optimal security. FortiWeb 5.0 fully supports IPv4-to-IPv6 and IPv6-to-IPv4 communications.

What makes the FortiWeb product family unique is its ability to combine broad Web application protection with Layer 7 load balancing and a built-in vulnerability scanner in a simple-to-manage system that does not require add-on licenses for each system component.

FortiWeb 5 delivers new capabilities that include:

• Search Engine Identification: With up to 30 percent of Web application traffic requests coming from known search engines such as Google, Bing, Yahoo and others, coupled with a proliferation of automated attacks, botnets, zombies and orchestrated DDoS attacks, the need to correctly identify sources and their intention is vital. FortiWeb 5 provides this capability so organisations can protect and optimise their Web applications accordingly. This feature also ties into the software’s new bot control identification layer, which proactively identifies whether in-bound traffic is coming from legitimate search engines or botnets, anonymous proxies, malicious sources or large scale automated attacks

• Bot Dashboard: As a complement to the bot control layer, the new bot dashboard provides security administrators an immediate visual snapshot of traffic hitting their Web applications so they can quickly ascertain whether bots crawling apps are known search engines or malicious scanners.

• Real Browser Enforcement: As an enhancement to its application layer DoS protection, FortiWeb 5 enhances its Real Browser Enforcement challenge response action to better validate requests, ascertain the legitimacy of users and weed out automated DoS tools.

“The introduction of FortiWeb 5 and our new high end Web application firewalls are designed for the most demanding enterprises and service providers,” said John Maddison, Vice President of Marketing for Fortinet. “Not only are we introducing more intelligent protection against the OWASP Top 10 threats, we’re delivering new appliances that leverage an application-aware load balancing engine to distribute traffic and route content across multiple Web servers. The FortiWeb product line combines the best of both worlds – the industry’s most advanced Web application security with optimal performance.”