There may — will, according to Mu Security — come a time when signature-based vulnerability assessment by itself is no longer a viable testing option.

Iconsider the term "ethical hacking" an oxymoron, but it has become a part of the information assurance lexicon whether I agree or not. However, the practical fact is that true penetration testing is not hacking in any form whatever.

Every now and then we see, as Monty Python used to say "...something completely different." The RazorThreat Threat Analysis Console is just such a product. The TAC, as RazorThreat refers to its product, analyzes inter-domain communications and determines through policy whether the communication is allowed or may be indicative of an attack.

SIM/SEM — security information management or security event management — often is characterized as being log correlation and analysis. LogLogic entered the market as an early player and focused on log management. That is still, five years later, where the company puts its efforts.

Occasionally one gets to see a set of products whose only connection is that they take really hard problems in a particular application space and address them in remarkably innovative ways. These are the solutions to hard problems that everyone says you can't do, but you have to do it anyway.

The perimeter defense group is a small one and there's a very good reason for that. Nowhere in the information security product space is there more convergence then here. In a group that used to contain IDS, IPS, anti-malware gateways, email gateways and numerous other specialized types of gateways, we see everything converging into universal threat management (UTM) tools. Even where the IPS still reigns, only an IPS that can be part of a bigger picture will survive.

The unified threat management (UTM) market is a fast growing segment of the security market and vendors are trying to cram more and more security into a single device. The major problem here is that most vendors take a best of breed approach and bring in third-party technology. This is where eSoft separates itself from the bunch.

It's just an intrusion prevention system (IPS), right? Well, not exactly. NitroSecurity is another of those companies that we've been watching for a long time. Initially, its claim to fame was a blazingly fast backend database. It provided that to developers of some very demanding applications, including IDS/IPS apps. The database platform shines when there are huge amounts of data to process without losing any.

Wireless is not the future. It is now. Organizations are demanding wireless connectivity and IT departments are struggling to deploy it, while security managers are pushing back hard until security concerns for this pervasive technology can be addressed. The issues are management and security.

Why bother to protect the network if we cannot protect the information on it? If we think carefully about the entire notion of an information security architecture, we must admit that it is the data that drives our security strategy. The network is there to carry and store the data. But protecting the network is not enough to protect the data. So we picked three products that address the data directly.