BreakingPoint LiveLook: Talking Customer Support
Caught up with Greg Griffith here at BreakingPoint and chatted with him about his role in support and what that entails. If you are a BreakingPoint user you may have already worked with Greg to help you with our testing solutions. Greg also chatted with us about his interests outside of providing support, including lending his film making skills to help us produce our test methodologies and his latest hobby...model rocketry.
Botnet Simulation
The other day I asked Dennis about botnet simulation and he started to demonstrate it, so we figured we would film a screencast. We ended up reviewing how to simulate a botnet attack using our testing tools. The screencast shows you how to combine application traffic and strike attacks to realistically simulate a botnet attack including the use of strikes such as denial of service and backdoor attacks using IRC. Enjoy:
BreakingPoint LiveLook: Testing with Real Application Traffic
A little bit of fun on this Friday afternoon...this morning we showed you Todd Manning's look at creating strikes for network equipment testing, well here is Tod Beardsley talking about how he creates the application protocols that folks use in order to properly test network equipment. Tod, after a little prompting, tells us how he creates the protocols and the ActiveX Strike.
BreakingPoint LiveLook: Security Strikes & Patch Tuesday
Our BreakingPoint LiveLook on Monday garnered some interesting thoughts, one left in the comments section asked for a video of the security research team on Patch Tuesday. Instead of waiting till next Tuesday we grabbed the camera and Dennis asked Todd Manning to tell us what it is like on Patch Tuesday and dive into what he does to create the security strikes used in our network equipment testing solution. Enjoy...
Now be sure to vote on Todd's inquiry at the end of the video. Either comment directly on the video (press +) or in the comments section.
BreakingPoint LiveLook: Under the Hood
We continue taking a look at some of the "behind the scenes" activities here at BreakingPoint, for your viewing pleasure. Yesterday we had Dennis show us under the hood of our network equipment testing solution...from processor to packaging. Take a look and if you have any questions let us know, you can comment directly on the video and of course in the blog comment section.
National IPS Testing Week
Looks like this is the week to talk about IPS testing. NSS Labs had some very interesting news and a blog post around their upcoming testing of 10 Gbps IPS devices. BreakingPoint is involved with the NSS Labs test, who released their IPS test methodology in conjunction with the announcement. It is important and interesting to watch other testing methods, particularly from a respected group like NSS Labs. This got me thinking about the one video in our series that I mentioned in my earlier post; "Testing Victims". This video brings home a critical issue around testing content-aware devices when Rik and Dennis discuss how the equipment most likely won't come within 50% of their public performance claims. And the guys note that it's not their fault. It's the legacy testing equipment they used that couldn't truly test the devices with stateful application traffic at the right speeds.
Because I hate to see "National IPS Testing Week" (my unofficial claim...for now) come to an end I wanted to highlight some of the individual videos, starting with "Testing Victims". You can check out all eight videos on the IPS Test page.
IPS Test Methodology Intro
We've been busy with a lot of exciting developments in BreakingPoint Labs, one of which you will hear about on Tuesday. I thought that I would whet your appetite a bit though and post up this intro video starring our own Dennis Cox and Rik Maerz. In this video, one of eight we will be posting along with materials, Dennis and Rik introduce the upcoming Intrusion Prevention System (IPS) test methodology being put together by BreakingPoint for testing a range of IPS devices.
I personally found the videos and ultimately the test methodology to be extremely helpful in understanding the full capabilities of our products. What resonated with me the most was how you can apply your tests to measure a variety of instances, vulnerabilities, application protocols and more. This remains true across different devices. As you will hear in the video Dennis and Rik generated the methodologies by testing a spectrum of devices (and they also do a clever job of censoring the actual names).
Go check out the intro here and stay tuned for episode 2, a discussion of past IPS tests.