Fortinet Unveils New Web App Firewall OS, Appliances

Fortinet has introduced a new operating system for its FortiWeb Web application firewalls.

With FortiWeb 5 OS, the company has added a number of security enhancements to help users separate legitimate and malicious traffic. Announced today alongside of the operating system are three new Web application firewall appliances – FortiWeb-3000D, FortiWeb-3000DFsx and FortiWeb-4000D.

Designed for managed security service providers, Internet Service Providers and other large enterprises, FortiWeb 5 includes a search engine identification feature that is tied into the bot control identification layer and proactively identifies whether in-bound traffic is coming from legitimate search engines, botnets, anonymous proxies or some other source.

“The introduction of FortiWeb 5 and our new high end Web application firewalls are designed for the most demanding enterprises and service providers,” said John Maddison, vice president of marketing for Fortinet, in a statement. “Not only are we introducing more intelligent protection against the OWASP Top 10 threats, we’re delivering new appliances that leverage an application-aware load balancing engine to distribute traffic and route content across multiple Web servers.”

FortiWeb 5 also enhances its Real Browser Enforcement challenge response action to enhance request validation and determine the legitimacy of users versus automated denial-of-service tools. There is also a new bot dashboard available in the release as a compliment to the bot control layer that provides security administrators a visual snapshot of traffic hitting their Web application.

The FortiWeb 5 OS is now available as a free update to all existing customers with a valid support contract. The appliances are available today.