VSA NG-5000

As part of Finjan Software’s Vital Security Appliance range, the NG-5000 is one of a growing number of products designed to deal with the myriad of threats facing companies today. It uses a 2.8GHz Pentium 4 processor, has two Gigabit Ethernet and four Fast Ethernet ports.

Deployment will depend on the size of your network, and you can make one box do all the work or, for large networks, install one as a policy server for centralized, web-based management and have other boxes as scanners.

The level of protection depends on the security options you enable. The NG-5000 can be installed with third-party AV products and web filters. This means it can be integrated into your existing security infrastructure.

On top of the third-party scanners, Finjan offers its own anti-spyware protection. It works at the gateway and is configured through the same simple-to-use web interface as the others.

There is a range of protection on offer, which starts with Finjan’s list of known spyware sites. Blocking by this category means that you can filter out a lot of sites, preventing your users from being infected.

Next, Finjan has a code analyzer, which can block installation of spyware based on its Active Code Profiles, which look for spyware behavior in network traffic. Finally, with tools to block mobile code, it was very successful at preventing spyware from infecting our test PC. It can do all of this before signatures are released.

The NG-5000 also monitors outgoing internet traffic and stops existing spyware from sending information out. With detailed reporting available, you can soon track down the problem PCs and target them for fixing. An optional client is available for PCs that have to leave the corporate network, such as notebooks.

As a gateway product, there are no removal tools, so you will still need desktop protection. But this is an excellent security appliance.