Symantec teams up with Nortel to stop malware

Network vendor Nortel and security firm Symantec jointly launched a new system last week to protect companies’ networks from malware.

The system combines Symantec’s intrusion-prevention and security-update technologies with the deep-packet inspection technologies built into the Nortel application switch. The new system will continually monitor the network for malicious activity to try to block attacks.

Paul Compton, Nortel’s enterprise product marketing manager for Europe, said, “Our Application Switch will have Symantec’s Intelligent Network Protection [SINP] software installed as firmware running together with our Intelligent Traffic Management [ITM] feature.”

Edilberto Bottini, Symantec’s product marketing manager for Europe, said, “We are monitoring for threats continuously and we have a big security database collecting events from 24,000 devices in 180 countries. We are validating and qualifying these events and producing updates, but our code is also doing protocol-anomaly detection to identify buffer overflows, for example. From detection to updating the threat signature on the box takes a few hours.”

Compton said that ITM uses deep packet inspection tools to classify traffic, which allows IT managers to “block, prioritise or detect peer-to-peer [P2P] traffic and rate-limit it. The switch could sit in a key part of firms’ networks – for example, where WAN or LAN links come together – to manage the traffic.”

The new system is available now. Pricing for Nortel’s switch ranges from £8,500 + VAT up to £20,700 + VAT, and the Intelligent Traffic Management feature licence costs £6,375 + VAT. Symantec’s Intelligent Network Protection annual subscription costs £2,650 + VAT.