Athena Security Achieves OPSEC Certification from Check Point

Released on: June 01, 2010, 6:34 am
Author: Anjali Gurnani http://www.athenasecurity.net
Industry: Software

Chicago, Illinois, June 01, 2010 – Athena Security Inc., today announced that its Firewall Analysis solution, FirePAC, has achieved OPSEC™ (Open Platform for Security) certification from Check Point Software Technologies Ltd. (NASDAQ: CHKP), the worldwide leader in securing the Internet. Through OPSEC certification, FirePAC supports Check Point’s Market-leading NG, NGX R65 and R70 based on the software blade architecture and delivers comprehensive analytics for maintaining always secure, always tuned and always compliant firewall infrastructure.

FirePAC boosts the usability and security effectiveness of Check Point installations by delivering on these key requirements for network/security engineers:

Check Point Migration Support

• Dramatically accelerate the migration process from other vendors and ensure that the target policies are equivalent to the original. Athena FirePAC is the only solution that can analyze and compare the policies for behavioral differences and provide remedies for the errors introduced through the conversion process.

Comprehensive Risk Mitigation

• Identifies risks to critical hosts based on overly permissive rules or rules allowing dangerous services.

• Provides flexibility to define your own custom security zones and create new checks or modify existing checks to reflect unique business requirements.

• Takes into account what networks are reachable from each interface in the firewall based on ACLs, NATs, routing and anti-spoof settings to provide a more precise risk analysis.

Firewall Rule Cleanup and Optimization

• Finds every possible type of structural rule redundancy to find more rules for removal than any other product.

• FirePAC can also find all unused rules based on log history.

• Recommends optimal rule order that places the most used rules as far up as possible towards the top of the rule base without causing any disruptions to critical business services.

Rule/Object Search across your firewall inventory

• Finds all references to an object including parent and child relationships.

• Cuts through objects with multiple levels of membership hierarchies to pinpoint the services and addresses allowed or denied by a rule.

PCI Audit

• Produces automated PCI audit reports that go beyond a checklist for minimal compliance. FirePAC computes permitted traffic flows through the firewall to determine what is allowed to reach your credit cardholder data.

“Athena Security is dedicated to offering affordable and focused solutions to engineers who seek to increase the speed, accuracy and efficiency to analyze firewall policies”, said Adarsh Arora, CEO of Athena Security. “Those on the front-lines of managing network complexity are dealing with a significant problem as business communication demands more expert handling of change requests. Achieving OPSEC certification was an important product milestone to confirm that our analysis of Check Point configuration data is reliable, consistent and complete.”

Customers of Check Point's high security firewalls will find FirePAC an extremely valuable tool to help them discover security lapses in their programming of these firewalls and to optimally organize complex rule bases. FirePAC's auditing and reporting capabilities automatically check and report for compliance against industry best practices and standards like PCI-DSS. Athena FirePAC can be downloaded for a 30-day evaluation and purchased in a variety of focused solution options for temporary or ongoing operational use on small and large firewall infrastructures. To try Athena FirePAC for free, see http://www.athenasecurity.net

About Athena Security
Athena offers infrastructure analysis tools that identify the precise relationship between firewall rules and network services in a single device or across a complex network. With a comprehensive focus on configuration data, Athena helps network and security engineers perform what-if analysis that reduces the reliance on diagnostics and validation by testing. Over 300 companies turn to Athena products, Athena FirePAC and Athena Verify, for standardized and consistent intelligence to reduce the time and effort required for policy management on network security devices. For more information see http://www.athenasecurity.net

About Check Point's OPSEC® OPSEC (Open Platform for Security) is the industry's open, multi-vendor security framework. With over 350 partners, OPSEC guarantees customers the broadest choice of best-of-breed integrated applications and deployment platforms that support Check Point's Secure Virtual Network Architecture. Products that carry the OPSEC Certified seal have been tested to guarantee integration and interoperability.

For complete OPSEC Alliance program information, including partner and product listings, the freely available OPSEC SDK (software development kit) and evaluation versions of OPSEC Certified products, visit http://www.opsec.com

Media Contact:
Anjali Gurnani
Athena Security
Phone: 630-629-0600 x21
agurnani@athenasecurity.net
(4-15-CL)