Japan is number three in this month readers list

I was checking my statistics the other day, and have found that Japanese readers are now in the third place for this month after Germany and USA. Switzerland is on the fourth.

I thank you all guys, but especially those from Japan. I love that country, and frankly, I would not expect my blog to be popular there. That is a pleasant surprise.

Thanks a lot for your interest.

私はあなたの興味のために非常に感謝

IPS Blade training is released

Check Point just have released a new training blade for IPS. As with other "blade" training modules, it consists of one hour Web-based lecture and practical lab.

Just a reminder. Starting with CCSE R75 PearsonVue based CCSE exam will give you only two years of benefits. After that you will have to take two blade trainings every year to maintain your CCSE status.

First CCSA R75 course in Switzerland, possibly in continental Europe is over

Yesterday I have finished teaching my first CCSA R75 course. It is not only my personal first, it is also the very first course in Switzerland. Due to my knowledge it is the first ever in continental Europe.

Hope my students are happy, because I am.

Course is much better then the previous R71/70 ones. I have spotted only a few errors in the books, minor ones. It is well timed, we have managed to go through all the labs thoroughly.

I hope to see the participants again in my classroom.

I appreciate Dimension Data and Computerlinks to give me this opportunity. Thanks a lot everybody, and especially Yasushi and Mykhaylo from Computerlinks for effective and reliable lab platform.

Update: I have been informed that there was at least one CCSA R75 course provided in UK in early November.  Changing the subject accordingly :-)

about to teach my first CCSA R75

I will be teaching CCSA R75 class in Bern the next week.

This class is a cooperation of Computerlinks and Dimension Data ATCs.

I had started my CCSA courses about 7 years ago, internally in Check Point Israel; for new hired. It was R60 by then. Now it is R75, and it seems to be the first ever CCSA R75 course in Switzerland.

While working through the course materials, I have to admit books are much better than some time ago. Of course, there are some things I would describe differently, but there are no obvious mistakes in the books, at least I have not spotted them yet.

Well done, Check Point!

Dimension Data will be providing both CCSA and CCSE R75 courses in 2012, so you are welcome in my class. You can subscribe on our ATC Web portal any time.


See you in our training class, guys.

more than 100K hits on this blog

I have started this blog just before the last Christmas, on December 23, 2010. Since then there are more that 100 000 hits on this blog, in average around 300 hits  per day.

This is not too much, but I sincerely appreciate your interest, guys.

Here are some interesting (at least to me) statistics.

The most viewed post is one about changes in migration tools between R6x and R7x. It got almost 1600 pageviews.

The second popular is one with the links to upgrade paths diagrams, almost 700 pageviews till now.

NSS lab results for IPS solutions is the third most viewed post in this blog.

Germany, USA and Russia host most of the reader, in the mentioned order. 48% of the visitors use Firefox browser.

70% visitors are are working on Windows, 13% on Linux and 10% on Macs. The rest of the audience is accessing these pages from smart phones and other mobile devices. 

Hope you find here what you are looking for. If not, let me know how I can help you.

And again, thank you all very much.

Check Point to reinforce GRC with a new acquisition

Check Point has just issues a press release about acquiring Dynasec Ltd., provider of Governance, Risk Management and Compliance (GRC) solutions, more known as easy2comply.

Dynasec Ltd is Israeli based privately owned company. Looking on their products' UIs, I could say it is quite close to Check Point vision and user experience.


 It looks like the usual players on this field, Tufin and Algosec will be challenged soon when it comes to Check Point GRC related tasks.

Impressive demo of 61000 in Paris

Tuesday this week I was lucky to attend Check Point road show dedicated to the new 61000 series appliance.

I has been genuinely impressed by the box.

New chassis are designed and manufactured in Israel by a company which name is not disclosed. Chassis includes 2 Security Switch Module (SSM) blades and up to 12 SGM blades - Security Gateway Modules. Each SGM is equivalent to 11000 series appliance.

Chassis has 3 power supplies and two management modules. Two chassis can run in an HA cluster.

It does not matter how many SGMs you have in your system, one or twelve. You define just one gateway object in SmartDashboard for the whole chassis.

If you start with a couple of blades, you do not need to change configuration to add more. Just plug in your new SGM, and it will be automatically populated and added to the system to share the load with others.

Performance ability is just amazing. We have performed live stress tests with for Spirent Avalanche boxes:

We could barely reach around 50% CPU usage with firewall rules, logs and IPS set to recommended protections. Spirent was not powerful enough to push the box further!!!

Load sharing on this chassis is another great thing. SSM shares the load between SGMs by creating flows. Each flow is defined by IP addresses and/or SPIs. Service ports can be added to this logic, if required. There is a new technology, SyncXL to provide redundancy between SGMs in case of failure.

Once more, from management perspective this is not a cluster. Sync and load sharing are all taken care by the appliance internally. Sync communications are performed on chassis backbone, no user intervention is required to configure it.

There are some limitations, like VSX not being supported for the moment. But guys, even considering all downsides, this is most probably the best and most performant security appliance in the world.

Well done, Check Point, really well done!