The inadequacies inherent in current defences have driven the development of a new breed of security products known as Intrusion Prevention Systems (IPS). This is a term which has provoked some controversy in the industry since some firewall and IDS vendors think it has been “hijacked” and used as a marketing term rather than as a description for any kind of new technology. Whilst it is true that firewalls, routers, IDS devices and even AV gateways all have intrusion prevention technology included in some form; we believe that there are sufficient grounds to create a new market sector for true Intrusion Prevention Systems. These systems are proactive defense mechanisms designed to detect malicious packets within normal network traffic (something that the current breed of firewalls do not actually do, for example) and stop intrusions dead, blocking the offending traffic automatically before it does any damage rather than simply raising an alert as, or after, the malicious payload has been delivered. Within the IPS market place, there are two main categories of product: Host IPS and Network IPS.

Reprinted from www.nss.co.uk