Company believes continued focus on the evasion resiliency of its IPS engine and other security controls serves as major differentiator as just two vendors achieve the zero-evasion benchmark

SEATTLE – July 17, 2019 – WatchGuard® Technologies, a global leader in network security and intelligence, secure Wi-Fi and multi-factor authentication, today announced that for the third consecutive year its firewall product has achieved a “Recommended Rating” with the release of the 2019 NSS Labs Next Generation Firewall Group Test. WatchGuard’s Firebox M670 earned high security effectiveness and low total cost of ownership, and is identified as one of the only two products to observe zero evasions. The Firebox M670 successfully blocked all 406 of the evasion attempts, and it also blocked 96.69% of 1,784 attacks that were tested by NSS Labs.

“The firewall market is one of the largest and most mature security markets. However, it’s evolving quickly as trends like Web 3.0 push critical applications through the firewall,” said Vikram Phatak, Founder at NSS Labs. “With a Recommended rating for three consecutive years, WatchGuard’s security products and services are a strong option for any business looking to bolster their security architectures.”

NSS Labs testing focuses on the main differentiators for next generation firewall (NGFW) products: security, performance/functionality, and cost. For security effectiveness, NSS Labs engineers with deep expertise use multiple commercial, open-source, and proprietary tools, including NSS Labs’ network live stack test environment. The testing goes beyond simple delivery of attacks to incorporate evasion techniques, which are a means of disguising and modifying attacks at the point of delivery to avoid blocking by security products.  

“Often times, customers view security services as simple check boxes that are relatively identical across vendors throughout the industry. But there are many important technical differentiators that make certain security services more effective than others,” said Jack Waters, SVP of Engineering at WatchGuard Technologies. “We believe our NSS Labs results prove that WatchGuard’s focus on improving evasion resiliency on the NGFW serves as a substantial differentiator in the market and has bolstered the level of network protection our customers enjoy.”

All WatchGuard Firebox appliances in the UTM and NGFW family run the same Fireware operating system and security services as the M670, and thus benefit from the same efficacy, stability, performance and total cost of ownership strengths. Engineered for midsize and distributed enterprises that are struggling to effectively and affordably secure networks in the face of explosive bandwidth rates, encryption traffic, video use and connection speeds, the M670 delivers total protection and visibility in an easy-to-deploy and manage appliance. The Firebox family of products is available through WatchGuard’s global community of channel partners.