Athena Security Rolls Out FirePAC 2.0 Firewall Policy Analysis Solution

PRESS RELEASE

January 14, 2009, Lisle IL, Athena Security, the leader in sophisticated yet affordable products for reducing the cost to manage and understand complex firewalls, announced today the general availability of Athena FirePAC 2.0. FirePAC is easy to use, downloadable and cost effective software for troubleshooting service availability, hardening the firewall against security risks, predicting the impact of ACL rule changes, and cleaning up unruly rulebases. For as little as $399 per firewall, companies of any size can instantly generate FirePAC's full set of detailed reports for Cisco (PIX and ASA), Checkpoint or Netscreen firewalls.

With growing business consolidation and spending cutbacks, companies are faced with limited resources for ensuring the best firewall security posture. Now engineers can turn to Athena FirePAC to significantly improve investments in existing infrastructure. FirePAC 2.0 offers consistent, verifiable assessment results for ensuring a well-designed security policy that works to provide access to internal networks from authorized sources, while correctly preventing unauthorized access.

Gregory Nicozisis, Senior Security Architect at 99 Only Stores, a billion dollar publicly held retailer based in Texas says, "When compared to the other tools I have evaluated, there is no comparison for the reports, price and functionality. Athena FirePAC provided proof of compliance through a third party tool. Further, excellent granular detail of firewall configurations provided 'beyond' PCI compliance by enhanced security modifications. When I recommend FirePAC to friends, I simply tell them 'It's great, cheap and works!"

New features in FirePAC 2.0 include:

PCI DSS V1.2 analysis to determine compliance to the firewall related PCI requirements in a single convenient report. This report contains a list of control items as well as customized policy calculations to verify that the firewall is configured to keep credit card data secure.

A list of the ACL rules that are responsible for the highest number of security exposures in the configuration. Designated as "culprit rules", this list can be used for pinpointing priority rule changes.

New user interface designed to work for any skill level. Working with FirePAC does not require any training or technical skill. Installation takes minutes, and with two very simple steps, users can generate a complete assessment.

Over 120 security policy checks. Taken from the industry's most notable authorities on network security, this comprehensive library immediately transforms any firewall from complex to simple.

Audit friendly data collection that is also safe to use. FirePAC uses no active connections to the device by performing static analysis on a configuration file.

FirePAC still has the other same great benefits. The policy query capability allows users to bound the analysis to answer specific questions for debugging the policies and pinpointing rule changes for remediation purposes.

FirePAC's policy comparison feature shows the impact of rule changes to the overall behavior of the firewall. It is used to model the effect of a change before it is deployed to the network, or after, to verify that the rules implement a given security policy correctly. This feature goes way beyond a text difference of two configuration versions. It reveals how ACL changes can ripple across the firewall to cause unexpected differences in policy.

Over 300 companies are using FirePAC to tighten the policies on their firewalls so they can drive down management costs and do more with less. FirePAC 2.0 is immediately available as licensed software or through the Athena ReportZone service. Existing customers can upgrade for no additional charge.

For more information, please see http://www.athenasecurity.net or contact the Athena Security sales department at 630-353-1900.

About Athena Security Athena provides comprehensive analysis tools for managing and simplifying firewall configuration complexity. We make this possible by revealing the precise relationship between firewall rules and network services in a single device or across an entire network. Developed to address the operational needs of network engineers, Athena's products provide safe, offline analysis with the strength, attention to detail, scale and flexibility necessitated by companies of all sizes. For more information, please see http://www.athenasecurity.net. ### Media Contact: Anjali Gurnani Athena Security Phone: 630-353-1900 x21 [email protected]