Mi5 Enterprise Spygate

The now available flagship offering of Mi5 Networks, the Mi5 Enterprise Spygate is targeted to medium to large enterprises and offers anti-spyware capabilities that are implemented at the organization's network gateway.

The Mi5 Enterprise Spygate is a hardware appliance that can be deployed inline (in either monitoring or blocking mode) or as a strictly monitoring platform off of a switch SPAN or TAP. When deployed in inline mode, the device acts as a transparent bridge that is invisible to the network at large.

The device scans both inbound and outbound traffic in real-time, examining the actual traffic itself for the existence of spyware threats via a combination of methodologies including "Quick Scan" (checking traffic against IP or URL blacklists), "Deep Scan" (signature-based scanning of file downloads and Web page active content), and "Multi-Scan" (protocol-independent scanning of outbound communications for the blocking of phone-home requests). Updates to the spyware definition information are automatic and provided hourly from the vendor (this can be changed to daily or manually by the customer); a process backed by the vendor's Community Spywatch correlation technology, which leverages collective learning from customer deployments for the identification of new spyware threats. The device also allows users to enter URLs or IP addresses into its white and blacklists.

In addition to monitoring and blocking, the device can also alert administrators as to the existence of already infected PCs on their networks (by examining the outbound communications to an external server). Reporting options include tools for both online filtering and scheduling (reports can be scheduled to be delivered by E-mail daily, weekly, or monthly), and reports can be exported to CSV files for use in external programs.

The appliance itself is offered in several flavors, ranging from the 1U mini 001 model with support for up to 250 users; to the 2U (full size) 009 model with support for up to 10,000 users. All models contain both a network management (browser-based, includes a 3 step setup wizard) and TAP/SPAN port (1Gb/sec each) and dual Ethernet ports for inline deployments. The dual Ethernet ports are 10/100 Base-T on the 001 model and 10/100/1000 Base-T on all other models. A hardware bypass (if the unit experiences hardware or software failures, the bypass switch is closed and traffic continues to flow through the device unscanned). Finally, the top two models feature both RAID data protection and redundant power; not available on the other models.

Other featurers of the appliances include a user feedback mechanism allowing users to comment on sites that have been blocked (the blocking notice for the site can also be cusotomized); spyware threat-level categorization, the ability to block/strip only identified active spyware content on a page while delivering the rest of the page; and support for SNMP traps.

The Mi5 Enterprise Spygate is available now; base pricing (for the 001 model) starts at $1,995 plus a required support subscription offered in 1, 2, or 3 year increments ($1,250 for the first year).

Contact Mi5 Networks for further information.

product submission by EITPlanet Staff

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