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TippingPoint launches European offensive

Intrusion prevention vendor comes to London

Intrusion Prevention (IPS) specialist TippingPoint launched a major European expansion programme today with plans to open up offices in London and Scandinavia this month.

TippingPoint launched its first European office in Amsterdam at the start of the year and a sales office in Stuttgart last month. TippingPoint sells direct to resellers in the US but is looking to use specialist security disties as well as resellers as part of its European expansion plans. The company has poached e92plus from NetScreen (now Juniper) to act as its main cheerleader in the UK.

Firewall vendors such as Cisco, Check Point and Juniper are adding intrusion prevention functions to their firewalls as a way of defending against fast-spreading worms such as Blaster and Sasser. TippingPoint also faces competition from more specialist IPS vendors, such as Top Layer, but reckons it has timed its expansion at the time to coincide with increased European interest in anti-hacker technology. With revenues of $5.8m for fiscal 2003, TippingPoint is smaller than its rivals but reckons its approach can win over Europeans.

"Perimeter firewalls are porous and comprehensive patching is impossible. Not all end-points are under the control of IT. Intrusion prevention closes the gap by stopping attacks before they reach their target," explained TippingPoint's CEO Kip McClanahan. McClanahan said relying on intrusion prevention technology on firewalls has serious shortcomings because the majority of attacks come from inside organisations.

A recent IDC forecast predicted worldwide spending on security and ensuring business continuity would grow twice as fast as IT spending, reaching $116bn by 2007. Furthermore, according to DTI's Information Security Breaches Survey 2004, more than two thirds of UK companies have suffered a malicious attack in the past year.

TippingPoint's UnityOne Intrusion Prevention Systems offer automated protection against cyber attack, with technology that can scale to gigabit speeds. UnityOne protects routers, switches, DNS (Domain Name Servers) and other critical infrastructure from targeted attacks and traffic anomalies. The technology allows users to throttle bandwidth-throttling applications, such as P2P apps like Kazaa, freeing up resources for more important applications.

Along with its European expansion Ripping Point launch UnityOne-50, a security appliance designed to give remote branch offices and smaller enterprises the benefit of in-line intrusion prevention. The 50MB UnityOne-50 is available now at prices from around $10,000. The company also announced plans to launch a service provider-orientated 5Gbps appliance, The Unity-5000, in Q3 this year. ®

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