Products History

Outpost Firewall Pro

Outpost Firewall Pro has undergone multiple revisions and optimizations, adding new functionality every time a major release occurred. It has gone from the version 2.0 to the most recent 4.0 and 2008 versions. Below is a brief look back at the functionality evolution of Outpost Firewall Pro.

Version 2 added IDS (Intrusion Detection System), control of shared components, privacy restrictions and real-time monitoring of active connections.

Version 2.5 was focused on protecting a system against the escalating threats that thrived upon inappropriate local programs interaction and privilege exploitation, cases when a malicious program used a good application’s access rights to bypass a firewall and then divulge private data to hackers. This was the first Outpost release that provided solid coverage against the leak tests – the security programs designed to verify how strong the firewall’s outbound filters are. Outpost Firewall Pro beat all leaktests that existed, proving its enviable competence in tackling sophisticated intrusions.

Version 3.0 was a major overhaul: it added a host of new protection features, such as spyware scanner & real-time monitor, ID block which prevented pre-determined entries from leaving the confines of the protected PC, Ethernet protection that addressed the problem of man-in-the middle attacks.

Version 3.5 featured usability & automation improvements, focusing on providing assistance to users by collecting and distributing automated access policies across the user community. The ImproveNet system first emerged, enabling a user to benefit from the collaborated system of hassle-free application of access rulesets.

Version 4.0 added self-protection capabilities that won the first place in the firewalls’ resistance to unauthorized termination security tests. The ImproveNet system was extended to include not only the firewall’s network access policies, but the local interaction policies as well.

The current 2008 version centers around Vista support, new Web Control module that safeguards a user’s web surfing experience and internal optimizations designed to deliver faster spyware scans, less resource consumption and other performance gains.

Outpost Security Suite Pro

The first (2007) version of Outpost Security Suite Pro was unveiled in spring of 2007. It featured all-in-one security protection against all prevailing threats: viruses and malware (the dedicated antivirus and antispyware modules), hackers (the firewall), spam (the Bayesian-based antispam engine), zero-day threats (the Host Protection module) and privacy risks (parental features, scripts & ads restriction, other tools).

Version 2008, the most current, added Vista support, protection against known rootkits, was confirmed to cover all known leak tests (Outpost shares the first place in leak techniques prevention), Web Control, and an array of internal optimizations designed to increase performance, lower resource consumption and boost compatibility with different software.

Other Products

Spam Terrier – the free spam-combating program that adapts to the user profile and thus improves the spam catch ratio as it learns of the personalized definition of spam.

Outpost Network Security – corporate solution protecting endpoints against internal (LAN) and external (Internet) threats. Features real-time spyware protection, remote management and administration capabilities.

Technologies

ImroveNet – the system of collecting users’ Outpost configurations, processing them by Agnitum engineers and issuing universal and secure settings and distributing them across the participating members. The system benefits users by deploying automated access rules, yielding fewer prompts and alerts.

Application fingerprints – each application is identified according to the unique algorithms (SHA-256, MD5), which practically eliminate forgery and application spoofing.

Proactive Protection – a set of measures (Anti-Leak, Host Protection) that monitor how programs behave and interact on a protected computer, restricting unwanted or malicious activity. Thanks to this, zero-day attacks that defeat traditional security scanners can be proactively detected and prevented.

Flexible firewall with customized rulesets – enables experienced users to designate and apply however specific and tight access restriction rules they want, offering a multitude of filtering criteria.

SmartScan – scanning optimization that significantly accelerates subsequent scans, whereas unmodified objects are not examined on re-scans.

Self-Protection – an internal “sandbox” engine that isolates Outpost’s components from malicious access and prevents unauthorized shutdown of protection.