Security By Geography: Stop A Country With A Click

I'm hoping that it's more than a mere reinforcement of America's most unfortunate xenophobic tendencies, but TechGuard Security's new PoliWall ESE security appliances take a geographic approach to SMB security by filtering IP according to their country of origin.TechGuard president and CEO Suzanne Magee says her company has done most of its work for the Federal government -- including the Department of Defense -- but is now bringing its technology to companies of all sizes that need to protect themselves from cyberattack. PoliWall ESE (Enterprise Security for Everyone) comes in four tiers for different markets, small business, midmarket, enterprises, and data centers.

The company's HIPPIE (High-speed Internet Protocol Packet Inspection engine) uses neural networking to filter IP addresses with only nanoseconds of latency. Using a streamlined user interface on the outside of the rack-mounted appliance, companies can block individual IP addresses, ranges, IP subnets, cities and states, countries, or even entire continents. And the filtering works both inbound and outbound. Exceptions lists can be configured the same way, and the company has precompiled exception lists designed to make it easy to allow everything from only a single IP address, to the entire world except a single address.

Security mapping gets a whole new meaning.

Having a problem with spam or other issues coming from a particular country? Just turn them off.

Companies in the financial and healthcare industries, Magee says, have compliance issues, and don't need to be open to the whole world. Magee says the system is easy enough to install that any IT person can handle it after a couple hours training, and doesn't need attention once it's up and running.

Spam reduction is a side benefit, Magee adds. Using TechGuard's precompiled list of 5 million known spammers can have a huge effect on spam volumes, she claims.

Pricing for the Entry-Level PoliWall ESE -- a 1-unit rack-mounted appliance -- will start at $1900 when it becomes available later this year. the larger versions with more capacity can cost up to $9,900.

The PoliWall ESE rack mounted security appliance.

I like the idea of security by geography, but I have to admit that I really like TechGuard's sense of humor. Naming a goverment cyber security technology HIPPIE is genius, and the company's tag line is "PoliWall a cracker."

Seriously.

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