According to the latest research from independent testing organisation NSS Labs, five out of six popular firewalls failed to protect enterprises against common attacks such as TCP/IP protocol exploits, NSS Labs is a well-known product testing organization that evaluates a wide range of security gear including firewall, unified threat management, anti-malware, encryption, web application firewall, and other technologies on a regular basis.
NSS Labs undertook a study of leading firewalls at the start of the year and found that all of the systems tested with the exception of Check Point's failed on stability grounds or were unable to handle a TCP Split Handshake spoof attack.
The NSS Labs report says, "Five of the six products allowed external attackers to bypass the firewall and become an internal 'trusted machine.'" The only firewall tested by NSS labs that didn't was the Check Point one.
NSS Labs independently tested the Check Point Power-1 11065, the Cisco ASA 5585-40, the Fortinet Fortigate 3950, the Juniper SRX 5800, the Palo Alto Networks PA-4020, and the SonicWall NSA E8500.
