January 15, 2004

Sleuth9 helps companies comply with current and pending privacy legislation

DALLAS, TEXAS - DeepNines Technologies, a leading enterprise network security company, today announced its Sleuth9 Security System, which runs on the Sun platform, provides companies with the tools they need to maintain and prove compliance with current and pending privacy legislation. The Sleuth9 Security System and its ForensiX Capture System are uniquely capable of providing network intrusion prevention, plus the detailed records of network traffic that companies need to prove the safety and confidentiality of information entrusted to their care.

HIPAA, The Gramm-Leach-Bliley Act, the Corporate Information Security Accountability Act of 2003, California SB 1386 and other new and pending legislation have made it clear--corporate holders of personal, medical, and financial information are responsible for safeguarding that information from theft or misuse and may face criminal or civil penalties for non-compliance.

While safeguarding the personal information of clients and customers is certainly the right thing to do, it isn't as easy as it sounds. And corporations may find themselves needing to prove compliance--they may be assumed guilty until proven innocent. The 2003 CSI/FBI Computer Crime and Security Survey reports that while 25% of respondents suffered unauthorized access or misuse of their Web sites within the preceding 12 months, a full 21% had no idea whether their Web sites had been compromised. Clearly, corporations that store personal information of any kind, whether it's on their Web site or inside their computer network, must not only arm themselves against cyber-intrusion, they must also continually monitor network access to assure compliance with these new laws.

With the Sleuth9 Security System installed, corporations can easily comply with current and pending privacy legislation. Sleuth9 provides the fine-grained configuration options that are required to isolate and safeguard personal information. Using Sleuth9, administrators can easily create Virtual Nines --customized, granular security configurations--for each subnet or individual IP address on the network. The Sleuth9 ForensiX Capture System can capture and store every packet that traverses the network to the location where sensitive information is stored.

Sleuth9 sits inline, invisibly, in front of the router and evaluates all network traffic, both ingress and egress, at the packet level, to determine what is valid and what is malicious, intelligently mitigating the attack while allowing good traffic through. In addition, Sleuth9's ForensiX Capture System arms IT professionals with the detailed data they need to identify the type and source of the attack.

"These regulations are enacted because of security breaches that have already occurred, exposing sensitive information to exploitation. Customers, stakeholders, and partners need to be sure that the organizations they do business with have the technology in place to protect their personal and private information," said Sue Dark, DeepNines' CEO. "Sleuth9 provides companies with sophisticated asset and information protection. By automatically protecting and blocking access to information from unauthorized persons, as well as providing deep forensic information, we successfully eliminate the anonymity of intruders into networks. Sleuth9 tracks who they are and what they are after."

Sleuth9 can be deployed at the perimeter of the network or in front of other likely targets such as Web servers, mail servers, application servers, database servers, etc.

About Deep Nines Inc. DeepNines offers a scalable security platform for Global 2000 companies with a vertical market focus in education, government, telecommunications, energy and financial services. The DeepNines Security Edge PlatformT integrates intelligent firewall, intrusion prevention, best-of-breed secure content management, forensics and reporting. It operates outside the network infrastructure, improving organizations' security "deep into the nines." DeepNines' Security Edge Platform, the company's patent-pending security system, is a fully automated signature and behavior-based, intrusion prevention and traffic management system preventing known and unknown attacks from entering an organization's network. The Security Edge Platform runs on Solaris and Linux platforms from Sun Microsystems. To learn more about Deep Nines visit www.deepnines.com.