Fighting Botnets to Bitcoin with Dell Next-Generation Firewalls

If your IT organization is worried about how to fight the botnets to bitcoins threats, you needed to be at Dell Enterprise Forum in San Jose, California.

man looking at displays at a Dell conference

I had the opportunity to present and engage with our customers and partners at two breakout sessions: “Expand Your Portfolio with Dell Security Solutions” and “Best Practices for Combining Dell SonicWALL and Dell Networking.” The latter was a collaborative effort with Bala Pitchaikani, head of Product Management, Dell Networking. More than 1,500 people attended these sessions as well as the exhibit hall demos and hands-on tutorials.

The first ‘Connected Security” session was for our channel. Every single day companies are being probed, exploited, and infected. They lack the tools to visualize and counter these threats. To combat these cyberattacks, partners can expand their offerings to sell our big iron: Dell SonicWALL Next-Generation Firewall appliances. The key functionality is the ability to ‘see’ what applications are running on the network and who is running it, regardless of port, protocol, or file size. Add bandwidth management of important business applications (Voice over IP, email, online collaboration, etc.) and the network administrator can implement policy without having to decipher cryptic protocols and configure in a trial-and-error methodology.

Next up, I joined forces with my colleague, Bala Pitchaikani, advanced technical networking and security break out. We dove into how well Dell SonicWALL Next-Gen Firewalls and Dell’s Force 10 deliver interoperability for high availability deployments. These solutions will protect the enterprise against sophisticated malware, very targeted, zero-day exploits by foreign sponsored cyberattacks that utilize unlimited resources.

Bala spoke initially about the strengths of Dell’s Force 10. We are blending rich capability with the marriage of Dell networking and security. Their orchestration framework is the fastest selling product for Networking at Dell.

Representing Dell Security Products, I discussed how our customers and partners are faced with relentless invasion from of state sponsored attacks, botnets to mine bitcoin and ransomeware.

Dell SonicWALL NSA Series firewall

Why do traditional firewalls fail?

The epic fail that is happening in the marketplace is that organizations do not deal with security. Most firewalls do not protect you. Eighty-one percent of companies will turn off security to increase performance – access trumps security all of the time. Dell’s Next-Generation Firewalls deliver Reassembly-Free Deep Packet Inspection (RFDPI), anti-malware, SSL Decryption, and allow you to delineate and differentiate what malware is infecting your network. Application identification and visualization illuminate what percentage of your bandwidth is being used by iTunes or training. NGFWs literally give you the control to click and implement a policy and forensics to drill down on all network activity.

Poisonous attacks will continue to evolve, disrupt and steal from organizations. To learn more, here are two technical whitepapers: “Dell SonicWALL NSA E-Class and Dell Force 10 S-Series- Better Together” and “Full L2 and L7 Redundancy Solutions Using Dell SonicWALL and Force 10.” Here is a recent video highlighting Amerijet, an air cargo company, who has implemented Dell Networking and Dell SonicWALL solutions. Come back next year to Dell Enterprise Forum 2014.

About the Author: Patrick Sweeney