ThreatSTOP is spending the week up in San Francisco at RSA. We will be on the Vyatta booth, #452, showcasing our joint solution for the protection and centralized management of virtual and cloud firewalls.

I am please to announce a new release of the ThreatSTOP cloud service. With this release we are able to support subscribers whose public IP address changes from time to time. Typically these are subscribers to ADSL services where a new IP address is obtained whenever the ADSL link is reestablished but it may also apply to other internet connectivity types as well. We have added this capability by adding support for specifying a DNS name instead of an IP address when configuring a device. We expect the majority of subscribers to use a dynamic dns service such as dyndns.org or no-ip.com but any dns name can be entered, all that is necessary is that the dns record be updated promptly once the ip address has changed.

ThreatSTOP has a number of universities and places of higher education as clients and, it turns out, there's a good reason for this. That reason is 'Academic Freedom' and the possibly unintended consequences of that on computers and networks.

One of the themes of this blog is that IP reputation - when delivered in an actionable form the way we do at ThreatSTOP - can protect against threats that you had no idea existed. There's an interesting Reuter's report that explains the problem:

As anyone who reads the technical, financial or even the general news is aware, May has not been a good month for Internet security. We started with Sony which appears to have been comprehensively "PWNed" by one of more groups of criminals and we end up with the news of Lockheed and PBS joining the list of victims. Needless to say these news reports have led to a lot of our customers (and potential customers) asking whether ThreatSTOP's IP Reputation can save them.

Recently there have been a number of news stories discussing a recent rise of the Denial of Service attacks and noting that the compromised computers used to effect the attacks seem to be servers rather than PCs as was usually the case in the past few years.

It's been a long road, with some detours along the way, but we have finally made it! ThreatSTOP release 1.0 is out.

ThreatSTOP supports a wide range of commonly deployed firewalls and provides a number of additional features such as firewall log processing with graphical reporting and secure, reliable DNS.