In our continued effort to bring you and your network the best protection possible, ThreatSTOP is proud to announce the launch of ThreatSTOP 2.0. Here is what you can look for in the new release:

New Policy and List Management Capabilities

ThreatSTOP has always been a great way to centrally manage firewalls of different types from multiple vendors from a single location but as ThreatSTOP is applied in ever larger and more complex networks, a new structure is required to facilitate the management of hundreds of devices and many more custom block and allow rules. Now it is even easier to manage the rule lists for multiple firewalls from a single user-friendly console.

In ThreatSTOP 2.0 multiple devices can now share a single policy that defines all block and allow rules. Customers can define an entire class of devices (say “branch firewalls”) that should have the same policy (say “block traffic to known botnets and Eastern Europe but allow traffic to company offices in Eastern Europe”). All devices in this class can be provisioned with the identical policy configuration managed in one place. When changes are made to the policy such as adding another office or changing the countries to be blocked, all devices that use it are automatically updated with no need to touch the firewalls themselves.

In this release we have significantly improved the ability of customers to manage custom block and allow lists.  Now the lists can be effectively unlimited in size and each entry may be anything up to a class A network (/8 CIDR block) and may have an associated comment to ease change management. Updating is simplified as entries can now be added in bulk. We have also created a new list for Pingdom’s uptime testing tools and allow our customers to select whether they wish to use it as an allow list item (if they are pingdom customers too) or a block list item. We will be adding more “dual use” lists over time.

Finally as part of the new policy engine we have added additional geographic blocking capabilities and defined some standard policies that we recommend for particular configurations.

New UI

In ThreatSTOP 2.0 we have completely overhauled our user interface as part of the introduction of the new features. The new layout is visible on every page including the home page where we have changed what is displayed to make it more relevant.

Other new features

In past releases, each user account was assigned to a single set of customer devices. This made it difficult for managed service providers and consultants to manage customer devices and was less convenient for larger organizations with teams of network and security staff. In ThreatSTOP 2.0 we have introduced the ability for any user to delegate account control to another ThreatSTOP user. The delegation is reversible at any time by either party and there is no practical limit to how many users may be authorized to manage a single account.

Customers have also been looking for ways to automate the generation of reports and integration of the ThreatSTOP with their existing IT management processes. In this release we have added the ability to create and email reports to users at fixed times. The reports can be summaries of all traffic or detailed reports broken down by type of threat, firewall etc.

New Device Support

Finally we are pleased to announce that we have extended our list of supported hardware devices further beyond firewalls by adding support for Juniper Junos routers. All Juniper routers (MX Series, M Series and J Series) are supported when running Junos versions 10.4 and higher. As with ThreatSTOP installation on Juniper SRX firewalls, installation is simple, quick and may be done without any interruption to service. The addition of ThreatSTOP to Juniper routers dramatically increases network protection and available bandwidth by permitting the blocking of malicious traffic at the very edge of the network.

In addition, as blogged recently, we also have early availability code for big switch openflow controllers for customers interested in deploying SDN technologies in their data centers.

ThreatSTOP is now able to manage not just hardware firewalls but also routers, switches and virtual devices. We support most Juniper devices, all Cisco firewalls as well as the ISR platform, as well as Checkpoint, Vyatta, pfSense and generic linux (iptables) and BSD (Pf) firewalls.

We would like to invite you to attend a webinar where we will be demonstrating the new features of ThreatSTOP 2.0 and our new release as a whole. We will be holding webinars on the following dates/times, please click on your desired slot below and register:

Monday, December 3rd at 9:00am PST (12:00 pm EST) - Register here: https://www3.gotomeeting.com/register/444005038

Wednesday, December 5th at 12:00pm PST (3:00pm EST) - Register here: https://www3.gotomeeting.com/register/778452462

Friday, December 7th at  9:00am PST (12:00 pm EST) - Register here: https://www3.gotomeeting.com/register/351576734

Our customers and their security are at the forefront of all of our efforts and as always, your feedback on our latest enhancements are greatly appreciated.