• E-mail
• Print
• Comment
• Font Size
• Digg
• del.icio.us
• Discuss article

Santa Clara, Calif., Start-Up Lands $30 Million to Fight Computer Viruses

Posted on: Wednesday, 27 August 2003, 06:00 CDT

Aug. 28--Fortinet, a Santa Clara start-up offering a new kind of anti-virus firewall for computer networks, has raised $30 million from a fourth round of venture capital, to fund what some analysts say could be a strong advancement in efforts to fight computer viruses.

The market for firewalls -- the crucial layers of protection between the Internet and a company's internal computer network -- has been filled with start-ups offering new versions of security products over the past few years.

Large and small companies are looking for more sophisticated ways of protecting themselves from attacks like the SoBig.F virus, which has continually plagued computer users over the past couple of weeks.

Fortinet says its product is one of the first that offers a piece of hardware on the outer "edge" of a firewall that scans the content of incoming e-mails and other data for viruses, helping block harmful attacks before they enter a company's network.

It also scans the Web-site content being trafficked by employees, which has increasingly been a source of damaging attacks, the company says.

Many other products reside on an e-mail server or a desktop personal computer, which sit inside the firewall. They also don't have the ability to look into the data as it comes across the firewall, without slowing down the information flow.

As the Internet has evolved, and computer hacks have developed more sophisticated techniques to enter and attack corporate networks, so have security products developed to counter them.

In its most basic form, a firewall screens unwanted people from entering a network. But viruses are increasingly hiding in e-mails hijacked from legitimate users -- and they explode once they've entered the network.

Cisco Systems has a market-leading firewall product, but doesn't have its own solution that scans for viruses in incoming e-mails, says Gartner Research analyst Richard Stiennon. Other vendors -- for example, Network Associates and Symantec -- supply that solution, which can be integrated within Cisco's offering.

Cisco recently moved in that direction, though, when it purchased Okena for $140 million in a deal that closed in May. The product doesn't clean every file, but helps prevent viruses from causing damage once they've gotten in the corporate network, said Jeff Platon, of Cisco's security group.

Other companies, including NetContinuum and TippingPoint Technologies, offer a separate product that is able to scan incoming packets of data in real time, said Gartner's Stiennon. That allows them to find and counter an attack before it even enters the network.

Fortinet's aim to offer all of these security services in one product, which helps make it less expensive than buying multiple single solutions, said analyst Eric Hemmendinger, of the Aberdeen Group. The hardware component also offers a performance advantage: "The speed goes through the roof," he said.

However, Hemmendinger said hardware can sometimes be less flexible, for example, in allowing updates. He said the trick is in finding the balance between how much of the product to keep in software, and how much to keep in hardware.

Symantec's Howard Lev, group product manager for the company's firewall appliances, said inflexibility is why Symantec has stayed away from Fortinet's ASIC-based system when Symantec released its multiple-function appliance last year.

Atchison Frazer, director of corporate marketing for Fortinet, said the SoBig.F was easy to thwart for Fortinet: "That's a simple one for us, because it came through e-mails," he said. "When there's a virus, we actually strip those before they come into the enterprise."

It has shipped more than 15,000 units of its product since May 2002, a ramp-up that Gartner's Stiennon calls "impressive."

Stiennon said Fortinet's product is still too young for him to call Fortinet an industry leader. He said he still wants more feedback about how Fortinet works under different network conditions, and whether it provides effective customer support.

One early customer says he's happy: Rick Huang, IT manager of AltiGen Communications, a Fremont VoIP (Voice over Internet Protocol) phone company, said the product has protected the company from the SoBig.F virus. It was also good enough for him to replace the previous product he'd used -- from SonicWall.

Fortinet has an experienced team, led by Ken Xie, who also launched Netscreen, a company that was one of the first to put firewall software into a hardware device.

Fortinet's latest round of financing was led by Redpoint Ventures, and included Meritech Capital Partners. Existing investors also participated.

-----

To see more of the San Jose Mercury News, or to subscribe to the newspaper, go to http://www.mercurynews.com.

(c) 2003, San Jose Mercury News, Calif. Distributed by Knight Ridder/Tribune Business News.

CSCO, IT, NET, SYMC, TPTI, NSCN,

More News in this Category