Press Releases

BreakingPoint Publishes Truth-in-Testing Guides on Application Fuzzing and Emulating Distributed Denial-of-Service Attacks

Kyle Flaherty — 2009-06-30T14:38:12Z

Austin, TX – June 30, 2009 –BreakingPoint today released additional resiliency testing resources including detailed how-to testing guides for simulation of Distributed Denial-of-Service Attacks (DDoS) and Application Protocol Fuzzing. Additionally, the company has published overviews on many of their application protocol simulations including FIX, Encrypted BitTorrent, Oracle and more. Together these resources provide information and direction on how to complete more realistic performance and security testing.

BreakingPoint Releases Truth-in-Testing Guides and Application Protocol Briefs

Application Fuzzing is a critical element in any test scenario and has long been a part of any security auditor’s handbook. However it is also a terrific tool to use during the QA process since application fuzzing, though providing malicious or malformed data packets, can quickly determine performance issues and reveal bugs. Sean Bradly of BreakingPoint Labs has put together a guide to using fuzzing in the testing scenario.

Download “Application Fuzzing for Security Testing and Product QA”

Distributed denial-of-service (DDoS) attacks happen constantly in malicious attempts to make an online resource unavailable, commonly through inundating the target with external requests so that it cannot respond to acceptable traffic, or responds so slowly as to be effectively unavailable. BreakingPoint Labs’ Dustin D. Trammell and Todd Manning have put together a paper describing how to configure testing tools to simulate the traffic profile normally associated with a DDoS attack and then provide a number of DDoS attack scenarios.

Download “Simulating Distributed Denial-of-Service Attacks with BreakingPoint”

Read the Blog Post, “Simulating DDoS with BreakingPoint” from Dustin D. Trammell

Blended Layer 4-7 application traffic and live security strikes are the cornerstones for realistic testing. BreakingPoint supports more than 75 application protocols and 4,200 live security strikes, and more are provided each week. The team at BreakingPoint has created detailed data sheets on many of the application protocols and security vulnerabilities. These data sheets provide the testing community with an overview of how each protocol and vulnerability work, how BreakingPoint emulates them for testing and the benefit of using these during testing.

Download “BreakingPoint Application Protocol and Security Vulnerability Data Sheets”

About BreakingPoint

BreakingPoint accelerates the development and testing of high-performance content-aware network equipment with fast, accurate, responsive, and easy-to-use application, performance and security testing tools. BreakingPoint is headquartered in Austin, Texas, with offices throughout the world. For more information visit www.breakingpoint.com and download the latest resources for realistic firewall testing, IPS testing, server load testing and more.

BreakingPoint Provides the Only Realistic Network Simulation for Testing Vulnerability and Resiliency of U.S. Cyber Infrastructure

Kyle Flaherty — 2009-06-25T12:39:21Z

Austin, TX – June 25, 2009 – BreakingPoint Government Solutions Group today announced the department’s expansion in response to the increased demand from defense and civilian government agencies, leading government contractors and research organizations looking to perform resiliency testing. Resiliency testing is now a reality with BreakingPoint’s ability to simulate a true global network with blended stateful application traffic mixed with live security attacks at line-rate speeds and high session counts, delivered from the same address space.

Resiliency Testing Critical to U.S. Cyber Infrastructure

The United States’ cyber infrastructure is evolving to support a dynamic mix and high volume of application traffic, as well as defend against attacks from both criminal agents and enemies of the state. Testing the resiliency of mission-critical networks, as well as the devices and the services they deliver, is crucial for the agencies and organizations tasked with protecting our nation’s information network infrastructure. Only through testing using realistic network simulation can the government ensure the availability and performance of digital services and meet the deliverables of President Obama’s Cyber Security Initiative and the ASD/NII.

BreakingPoint Elite Provides Industry’s Only Resiliency Testing Tool

BreakingPoint Elite provides resiliency testing capabilities by simulating realistic blended application traffic mixed with live security strikes at line-rate throughput and maximum load conditions. BreakingPoint Elite’s resiliency testing capabilities provide:

Testing for all known vulnerabilities, including current and comprehensive security attacks and thorough application protocol fuzzing to harden defenses.
Line-rate traffic generation and session throughput of blended realistic applications to test for vulnerabilities and performance issues under maximum load conditions.
Automated tools that are consistently updated with the latest security vulnerabilities and application protocols.
Support for creating and testing proprietary application protocols and custom security attacks.
Ability to ensure compliance with the latest regulatory and industry standards.

Quote from Des Wilson, CEO, BreakingPoint Systems

“Resiliency testing is clearly critical to identifying and eliminating threats to the security and performance of our nation’s cyber infrastructure. And the definition of resiliency testing remains simple; test the network and network devices using blended application traffic mixed with live security strikes at line-rate speeds originating from the same address space. However, until today, the government agencies and organizations tasked to optimize and defend the cyber infrastructure did not have these capabilities. BreakingPoint Elite is the only testing tool architected to simulate the conditions of an actual network, providing the resiliency testing capabilities that help make it the only effective defense against net-centric threats and performance issues.”

BreakingPoint Elite Resiliency Testing Advantages

BreakingPoint Elite is engineered for ultimate realism, responsiveness, and performance. With an innovative network processor-driven design, a BreakingPoint chassis delivers authentic blended Layer 4-7 application traffic and live security strikes at 40 Gigabits per second (Gbps) with 15 million simultaneous TCP sessions. Advantages include:

Realistic Blended Application Traffic – BreakingPoint delivers a realistic blend of good, bad and proprietary application traffic such as voice, video, data and virus attacks at up to 40 Gbps in a 3-slot chassis.
Scalable Network Simulation – Scale easily to simulate global networks, such as Cyber Range, and apply load to test data centers and cloud services.
Create Protocols and Security Strikes –Toolkits to create proprietary application protocols and custom security attacks.
Comprehensive Attack Coverage – Leverage unprecedented security coverage including more than 4,200 live security attacks and full Microsoft Tuesday coverage.
Botnet Command & Control and Distributed Denial of Service (DDoS) Simulation – Ensure network devices can detect Botnets and mitigate DDoS attacks.
Complex Attack Scenarios – Simulate a wide range of sophisticated attacks with more than 80 evasion techniques.
Advanced Protocol Fuzzing – Identify performance issues or unknown vulnerabilities quickly by testing with malicious or malformed data packets.
Thorough Firewall and IPS Validation – Accelerate modernization of initiatives and evaluate performance and security claims of vendors by testing for vulnerabilities under peak load conditions.
Accurate Data Leak Protection and Precise Anomaly Detection – Validate Deep Packet Inspection (DPI) and filtering capabilities while ensuring monitoring and security systems can identify elusive attacks.
Standards Conformance – Conduct IPv4/IPv6 dual stack testing with the industry’s most current IPv6 stack and validate conformance to specifications using current standards such as Jumbo Frames.

About BreakingPoint

BreakingPoint Publishes Server Load Balancer Testing Methodology

Kyle Flaherty — 2009-06-16T14:25:38Z

Austin, TX – June 16, 2009 – BreakingPoint today released the industry’s most realistic and comprehensive server load balancer testing methodology. BreakingPoint’s test methodology provides Network Equipment Manufacturers (NEMs) and service providers with a hands-on guide to realistically test the performance and security of server load balancers while reducing their time-to-test. Download the Server Load Balancer Testing Methodology now.

Server Load Balancers Are Critical to the Overall Network Infrastructure

Server load balancers have become an integral piece of networking equipment, allowing for load balancing, application acceleration and high availability of services. Adoption of virtualization and cloud computing, as well as the overall increase of network load, has placed server load balancers in a critical juncture of any network infrastructure. Testing of these network-critical devices must be improved from the legacy methodologies currently in circulation and shift towards testing with realistic network emulation.

Server Load Balancers Require Realistic Testing that Match Deployment Scenarios

Server load balancers run on Layer 4-7 in front of a server farm, listening for a request for a service, forwarding the request to an available server and after receiving a response, replies to the client whom made the initial request. A realistic server load balancer test:

Needs to move beyond traditional testing tools simply pushing through HTTP-only traffic.
Must emulate blended application traffic to simulate a true network including HTTP, HTTPs, IMAP, FTP and more.
Provide realistic throughput speeds in order to determine overall performance and security.

Enhancing the Realism of Server Load Balancer Testing While Reducing Time to Test

The BreakingPoint Server Load Balancer Testing Methodology demonstrates how to configure a load balancer and set up the testing tools. Testing procedures include:

Testing the number of TCP connections per second the load balancer is able to handle provides a baseline test of the device’s performance capabilities.
Emulating blended Layer 4-7 application traffic in order to validate that the load balancer can handle a true network scenario.
Determining the overall bandwidth the load balancer can support through testing the number of HTTP/HTTPs connections per second the device can handle.
Simulating dynamic pages and image files to validate HTTP Caching performance and confirm the load balancer is locally caching needed files.
Confirming the load balancer can handle malformed packets or errors with the packet through application fuzzing.
Testing RFCs 793, 1945, 2616, 2818, and 3501.
Download the Server Load Balancer Testing Methodology now.

BreakingPoint CTO and co-founder, Dennis Cox

“Server load balancers are so important to today’s network infrastructure, helping to provide improved service uptime, redundancy and better application performance. In order to make this happen server load balancers must have a high level of awareness of application protocols traversing the network, provide local caching and handle a significant amount of simultaneous TCP connections. Now add onto this the influx of virtualization, and today’s server load balancers have become highly complex content-aware devices that help to optimize your network and the applications it is running. Yet traditional testing methodologies, which only call for testing with HTTP traffic, are still being used. Simply testing server load balancers with HTTP is unsuitable and irresponsible. True performance and security testing requires realistic and blended application traffic, appropriate throughput and even anomalies such as application fuzzing. The more realistic testing you do today, the better performing and more secure server load balancer you’ll see tomorrow.”

About BreakingPoint Elite

Using BreakingPoint Elite to perform server load balancer testing, Network Equipment Manufacturers (NEMs) and service providers will see more accurate performance and security results, as well as reduce their time-to-test and accelerate the development and deployment of the devices. BreakingPoint Elite is the only testing tool in the industry to provide:

The ability to natively generate blended application traffic from more than 75 stateful application protocols including HTTP, SMTP, AOL® IM, FIX, IBM DB2, VMware® VMotion™, Microsoft® CIFS/SMB, MAPI, Oracle, Encrypted BitTorrent™, eDonkey, RADIUS, SIP, Windows Live Messenger, World of Warcraft®, Yahoo!® Messenger and many more.
More than 4,200 live security strikes for testing, SSL testing, DDoS emulation, comprehensive Microsoft® Tuesday coverage, SYN flood attacks with up to 1 Million connections per second and more than 80 evasion techniques.
Unprecedented performance in one 10GigE blade:

15 million simultaneous TCP sessions
1.5 million TCP sessions per second
20 Gigabits per second of blended Layer 4-7 traffic
40 Gigabits per second of Layer 2-3 traffic

About BreakingPoint

BreakingPoint accelerates the development and testing of high-performance content-aware network equipment with fast, accurate, responsive, and easy-to-use application, performance and security testing tools. BreakingPoint is headquartered in Austin, Texas, with offices and customers in Canada, China, Finland, France, Germany, India, Israel, Italy, United States and the United Kingdom. For more information visit www.breakingpoint.com.

Qosmos Depends On BreakingPoint Elite for Testing Network Intelligence Technology

Kyle Flaherty — 2009-05-07T16:42:41Z

Austin, TX – May 7, 2009 –Qosmos, the innovative provider of software modules and appliances specially designed to collect network intelligence, has selected the BreakingPoint Elite for comprehensive Layer 2-7 network equipment testing.

Qosmos’ technology identifies and extracts information traveling over networks in real time, enabling a wide range of applications such as lawful interception, network protection, data retention, regulatory compliance, content-based billing, audience measurement and service optimization.

A real-time view of network events is crucial for a variety of business and security objectives. Extracting and analyzing both the granular details and the surrounding context of real-time data as it crosses networks provides a true picture of its purpose and value. Qosmos’ Network Intelligence technology identifies hundreds of protocols (the programming syntax that synchronizes data transmission between communications servers) and thousands of attributes within underlying metadata, giving solution providers a vast and growing knowledgebase of how applications and protocols are actually used.

“Using BreakingPoint Elite in testing Qosmos technology accelerates our time to market and ensures that we meet the performance requirements our customers demand for speed, security and scalability so that they can protect and optimize their solutions,” said Jérôme Tollet, CTO & Co-Founder, Qosmos.

Comprehensive testing of sophisticated content- and context-aware network technology like Qosmos’ demands a new level of realism and performance to enable more powerful solutions. Legacy testing tools simply could not provide Qosmos with realistic blended application traffic, mixed with live security strikes and limitless performance scalability.

“BreakingPoint Elite was created to finally give organizations the ability to properly test the next generation of network equipment. Qosmos’ data intensive network intelligence products are a terrific example of this next generation of products and certainly required a new method for testing. Only a few years ago a company such as Qosmos had few options when it came to high-performance and realistic testing tools. Today, with BreakingPoint Elite’s capabilities, we are helping these companies accelerate the development of the next generation of network equipment,” said Dennis Cox, CTO & Co-Founder, BreakingPoint Systems.

BreakingPoint Elite: The Only Testing Tool Capable of Testing Next-Generation Products

Testing of this complex technology requires the BreakingPoint Elite, a comprehensive Layer 2-7 testing tool that emulates the most application protocols in the industry, 4,000 live security strikes and up to 20 Gigabits per second (Gbps) per blade of Layer 4-7 traffic. This level of testing realism is critical in allowing Qosmos to accelerate product development and reduce the time-to-test for their network intelligence products.

About Qosmos

Qosmos provides software and hardware platforms that identify and extract information traveling over networks in real time with unparalleled precision and depth. Qosmos network intelligence technology enables a wide range of applications such as lawful interception, network protection, data retention, regulatory compliance, content-based billing, audience measurement and service optimization. Using Qosmos platforms, Network Equipment Manufacturers, Software Vendors and System Integrators can enhance their solutions with detailed intelligence to better monetize, optimize or protect networked information. For more information, go to www.qosmos.com.

About BreakingPoint
BreakingPoint accelerates the development and testing of high-performance content-aware network equipment with fast, accurate, responsive, and easy-to-use application, performance and security testing tools. BreakingPoint is headquartered in Austin, Texas, with offices and customers in Canada, China, Finland, France, Germany, India, Israel, Italy, United States and the United Kingdom. For more information visit www.breakingpoint.com.

BreakingPoint Reports Record Revenue for Fourth Consecutive Quarter

Kyle Flaherty — 2009-04-15T12:27:38Z

Austin, TX – April 15, 2009 – BreakingPoint today reported growth in revenue for the First Quarter of 2009, marking the company’s fourth consecutive quarter with record revenue. BreakingPoint provides network equipment manufacturers (NEMs), server vendors, service providers and government agencies more realistic testing of their network devices in order to accelerate product innovation and development while reducing time-to-test by 50% or more. This combination of benefits is the catalyst for growth and propels BreakingPoint’s vision of establishing truth in testing the performance and security of today’s dynamic network infrastructure. BreakingPoint has also found it to be a lethal competitive advantage versus traditional Layer 2/3 test vendors who continue to struggle to shed their antiquated architectures and respond to next-generation all-in-one Layer 2-7 testing.

Why BreakingPoint is Growing Rapidly
Network equipment is becoming more application aware, while application servers are becoming more network aware, helping to create a convergence responsible for the dynamic web services and cloud infrastructures transforming networking. In order to develop the next-generation infrastructure that will power this transformed network, organizations are looking to BreakingPoint testing tools’ unmatched performance, application, services and security realism, and ease-of-use and automation. BreakingPoint Elite accelerates the development of a new generation of dynamic network and server products with converged capabilities, applications and services.

BreakingPoint CEO Des Wilson
“BreakingPoint is growing rapidly because we have and continue to listen to market needs and deliver the right product and pricing model to our customers. We continue to break new ground in the testing tools industry by driving the most realistic applications and services at extremely high performance levels using the smallest footprint. Organizations today must realize that it is never enough to simply reduce your pricing, customers want to know about how you and your solutions can better serve them and their business as the networking landscape changes around us. BreakingPoint proves this value to our users, and our streak of tremendous growth is a strong indicator of the market’s response.”

BreakingPoint Q1 2009 Business Highlights

285% revenue growth quarter over quarter for Q1 2009 versus Q1 2008.
Nine new customers added in Q1 2009.
29 new customers added in 2008.
BreakingPoint Elite became the first network equipment testing solution to generate 15 Million TCP Sessions and 40 Gigabits per second (Gbps) of Layer 4-7 Traffic from a 3-slot chassis.
BreakingPoint was the first testing tools provider with more than 70 stateful applications and 4,000 live security strikes for realistic testing.
BreakingPoint introduced Client Simulator for realistic application load simulation of tens of thousands of users and Millions of sessions at speeds of up to 40 Gbps.
BreakingPoint became the first testing tools provider to emulate 340 Gbps of Layer 4-7 blended application traffic.
BreakingPoint opened new world headquarters in Austin, Texas.

BreakingPoint Tests Juniper Networks SRX5800 Services Gateway, Achieving 150 Gbps of Throughput and 109 Gbps of Blended Application Traffic

Kyle Flaherty — 2009-03-05T17:36:00Z

Austin, TX – March 5, 2009 – BreakingPoint announced today that the Juniper Networks SRX5800 Services Gateway achieved 150 Gigabits per second (Gbps) of stateless traffic, 109 Gbps of blended application traffic and live security attacks, and 30 Gbps of intrusion prevention with recommended policies. During a live demonstration held at Juniper Networks (see video at BreakingPoint Labs). BreakingPoint Systems tested the Juniper Networks SRX5800 Services Gateway for firewall and Intrusion Prevention System (IPS) throughput using four BreakingPoint Elite chassis. This event marks the first test of a network device using more than 100 Gbps of stateful blended application traffic made possible by BreakingPoint Elite’s innovative Network Processing Architecture.

Juniper Networks, Director Product Management, Brian Lazear
“Juniper Networks enables innovative solutions that allow the most demanding applications services. BreakingPoint Elite’s all-in-one Layer 2-7 performance and security testing of the Juniper Networks SRX allowed us to configure the 150 Gbps application layer test within minutes without having to configure each individual port. Additionally, BreakingPoint Elite’s ability to test with actual blended application traffic helped reinforce our claims of having the fastest product on the planet."

Video News Highlights:

News Highlights

Juniper Networks SRX5800 Services Gateway becomes first network device tested with over 100 Gbps of blended Layer 4-7 application traffic - an order of magnitude increase in processing speed compared to traditional firewalls.
As an extensible “no compromise” networking and security products, the SRX Services Gateways met or exceeded product performance specification of 120 Gbps firewall and 30 Gbps intrusion prevention throughput.
The SRX5800 is equipped with a robust list of features that include firewall, IPS, IPSec VPN, denial of service (DoS), Network Address Translation (NAT), and quality of service (QoS).
The SRX Series runs on Juniper’s powerful JUNOS® Software, a single network operating system integrating routing, switching, and security services, to enable businesses to deploy switching, routing and security infrastructure with the power of a single network operating system.
BreakingPoint conducted the test of the Juniper Networks SRX with a single configuration of four BreakingPoint Elite chassis, all managed from a single user interface and producing integrated reports. A single BreakingPoint Elite:

Generates blended Layer 4-7 traffic from more than 70 application protocols or custom application protocols at up to 40 Gbps
Generates 80 Gbps of Layer 2-3 traffic
Can scale easily with multiple BreakingPoint Elite’s to provide an unlimited amount of Layer 2-7 traffic using a single interface
Is the industry’s price-performance leader delivering the lowest cost per TCP session and lowest cost per Gigabit of Layer 4-7 traffic

BreakingPoint CTO, Dennis Cox
“Juniper understands the importance of providing truth and realism in the testing environment because it ultimately helps them provide the market with the most innovative products possible. Testing the Juniper Networks SRX this was abundantly clear as the product handled an immense amount of realistic application traffic and live security strikes. Testing with BreakingPoint helps Juniper truly see how products will perform in the real-world and make the necessary changes and development to make their networking products even better.”

For more information on the BreakingPoint test results or on Juniper’s SRX Services Gateways, please visit www.juniper.net/us/en/products-services/security/srx-series/.

About BreakingPoint
BreakingPoint accelerates the development and testing of high-performance content-aware network equipment with fast, accurate, responsive, and easy-to-use performance and security testing tools. BreakingPoint is headquartered in Austin, Texas with offices and customers in Canada, China, Finland, France, Germany, India, Israel, Italy, and the United Kingdom. For more information, visit www.breakingpointsystems.com.

© 2005-2009 BreakingPoint Systems, Inc. All rights reserved. The BreakingPoint Logo is a trademark of BreakingPoint Systems, Inc. All other trademarks are the property of their respective owners.

Juniper Networks, JUNOS, and the Juniper Networks logo are registered trademarks of Juniper Networks, Inc. in the United States and other countries. All other trademarks, service marks, registered trademarks, or registered service marks are the property of their respective owners.

BreakingPoint Invents New Network Processing Architecture to Deliver 40 Gbps of Blended Application Traffic from Single Testing Device

Kyle Flaherty — 2009-02-03T04:45:00Z

Austin, TX – February 3, 2009 – Today, BreakingPoint users realized a 2X boost in testing performance with a simple firmware upgrade, enabling them to now generate blended Layer 4-7 application traffic at up to 40 Gigabits per second (Gbps). BreakingPoint’s innovative network processor technology powers this unprecedented throughput while making the BreakingPoint Elite field-upgradeable and future-proof.

News Highlights

BreakingPoint Elite packs an enormous punch in a 3-slot chassis with the testing industry’s highest 10 GigE port density, lowest cost per TCP session, lowest cost per Gigabit of blended Layer 4-7 traffic, and lowest power consumption.
BreakingPoint Elite’s innovative architecture includes three distinct but integrated layers including a hardware layer featuring a blend of FPGAs, network processors and embedded processors. BreakingPoint’s innovative network processor technology empowers users with easily upgradeable testing equipment including weekly application protocols and security strikes and monthly software enhancements.
BreakingPoint’s all-in-one service and support program allows every BreakingPoint Elite user immediate access to these weekly application protocols and security strikes, same-day complete Microsoft® Tuesday coverage and monthly software enhancements.
Additional BreakingPoint Elite enhancements released today include automated profiles for RFC 2544 benchmark network tests. The addition of RFC 2544 to the BreakingPoint application profiles allows users to easily combine realistic application protocols to emulate different types of network traffic for these benchmark tests.

Dennis Cox, BreakingPoint CTO: “Time to retire legacy testing tools”

“BreakingPoint Elite has completely changed the game; today we doubled our performance ability with a firmware upgrade, allowing you to test servers or any network device with the highest performance and realism available,” said BreakingPoint CTO Dennis Cox. “Our patent-pending approach to network traffic generation puts us in a performance class of our own with the highest 10 GigE port density, the lowest cost per TCP session and the lowest cost per gigabit in the industry. Furthermore, BreakingPoint Elite is the most realistic testing product available, supporting more than 70 stateful application protocols, versus the dozen or so from our competitors, and providing a toolkit for users to build their own application protocols for testing. Traditional test vendors, locked into their archaic architectures, simply cannot keep up with the new realities of network equipment testing, it’s time to retire those legacy testing tools.”

About BreakingPoint

BreakingPoint accelerates the development and testing of high-performance content-aware network equipment with fast, accurate, responsive, and easy-to-use application, performance and security testing tools. BreakingPoint is headquartered in Austin, Texas, with offices and customers in Canada, China, Finland, France, Germany, India, Israel, Italy, United States and the United Kingdom. For more information visit www.breakingpoint.com.

BreakingPoint Elite Network Equipment Testing Solution Added to General Services Administration Contract

Kyle Flaherty — 2009-01-29T16:11:28Z

Austin,TX – January 29, 2009--BreakingPoint Systems announced today the addition of BreakingPoint Elite to the General Services Administration (GSA) Multiple Award Schedules (MAS). Via its exclusive partnership agreement with Technical Communities, Inc., United States Government agencies, military organizations and prime federal contractors now have access to BreakingPoint Elite. Using BreakingPoint Elite, organizations and agencies can achieve more realistic testing scenarios, reduce time-to-test and accelerate product deployment.

BreakingPoint Elite provides comprehensive Layer 2-7 testing for network equipment and application servers in a high-performance, compact, flexible and easy-to-use product. Unlike legacy testing tools that are designed for HTTP-only test environments and struggle to generate realistic Layer 4-7 traffic, BreakingPoint Elite provides authentic application traffic blended with live security attacks at speeds of up to 40 Gbps. For more information on BreakingPoint Elite visit www.breakingpointsystems.com or GSA’s e-commerce web site, www.gsaadvantage.gov.

Tom Taschler, BreakingPoint Systems

“Government organizations are under pressure to deploy next-generation high-performance network devices in order to manage rapidly growing application traffic and protect against security vulnerabilities. Prior to deployment these devices must be properly tested, but for decades legacy testing solutions have not had the ability to test quickly, easily or realistically. This has led to deployment delays and a false sense of network device performance and security. BreakingPoint Elite is the only network equipment testing solution that can emulate the critical combination of stateful application traffic, live security strikes and speeds of 40 gigabit per second. Government agencies using BreakingPoint reduce their time-to-test, accelerate product deployment and have a realistic measurement of device performance and security.”

BreakingPoint products are under GSA contract number GS-24F-0066M. Technical Communities provides content, transaction, marketing, sales support, reporting services, presentation and order processing.

About BreakingPoint

BreakingPoint accelerates the development and testing of high-performance content-aware network equipment with fast, accurate, responsive, and easy-to-use application, performance and security testing tools. BreakingPoint is headquartered in Austin, Texas, with offices and customers in Canada, China, Finland, France, Germany, India, Israel, Italy, United States and the United Kingdom. For more information visit www.breakingpoint.com.

BreakingPoint is First to Emulate VMotion Application Traffic for Realistic Testing of Network Devices Within a Virtualized Environment

Kyle Flaherty — 2009-01-28T22:15:55Z

Austin, TX – January 28, 2009 – BreakingPoint today announced the BreakingPoint Application Protocol for VMware® VMotion™ enabling Network Equipment Manufacturers (NEMs) and Service Providers to emulate VMware VMotion traffic at speeds of up to 40 Gigabits per second in their test environment. When combined with the BreakingPoint Application Protocol for NFS and SMB/CIFS, it eliminates the costs and delays of testing a VMware ESX server infrastructure and Storage Area Network (SAN).

VMware, with more than 120,000 customers (www.vmware.com/customers), is a leader in the virtualization market. As more and more networks introduce virtualized machines, VMware VMotion is being used to migrate these virtual machines between servers while they are actively running. It is becoming critical for NEMs and Service Providers to test network device performance in a VMware environment. Yet, the limitations of legacy test tools forced vendors to build out an additional infrastructure to emulate application traffic required to validate the performance and security of network devices designed for virtualized environments.

BreakingPoint Reduces Testing Complexity and Time-to-Test

Mike Hamilton, Director of Product Marketing, BreakingPoint
“BreakingPoint can replace much of the equipment used for testing with an easy-to-use single device, allowing you to eliminate the cost and time of setting up this complicated network to simulate the VMotion protocol. On top of the BreakingPoint application protocol for VMotion, our support of the NFS and SMB/CIFS protocol also emulates the SAN traffic that is necessary to test a VMware infrastructure.”

NEMs and service providers developing and deploying network devices use BreakingPoint to test equipment with a mix of real application traffic, live security strikes, and speeds of up to 40 gigabits per second of blended Layer 4-7 traffic in a single 3-slot chassis. BreakingPoint testing tools are updated consistently in order to support the most popular applications such as VMware VMotion and more than 70 additional application protocols and 3,700 security strikes.

Mr. Hamilton continued:
“VMware VMotion provides enormous benefits for data centers, including high availability and performance, while enabling load balancing and resource optimization. Using BreakingPoint you can emulate this application running on TCP port 8000, the communication between the VMware ESX servers, the TCP connection with the new destination server and even the ICMP echo request to ensure the seamless transfer of the connections between the old and new server. BreakingPoint testing tools provide an unmatched level of testing realism and performance in a small footprint device, supplying people with more accurate performance and security testing results and helping them accelerate the development and deployment of their network equipment.”

About BreakingPoint

BreakingPoint accelerates the development and testing of high-performance content-aware network equipment with fast, accurate, responsive, and easy-to-use application, performance and security testing tools. BreakingPoint is headquartered in Austin, Texas, with offices and customers in Canada, China, Finland, France, Germany, India, Israel, Italy, United States and the United Kingdom. For more information visit www.breakingpoint.com.

BreakingPoint Publishes Firewall Testing Methodology

Kyle Flaherty — 2009-01-13T18:00:58Z

Austin, TX – January 13, 2008 – BreakingPoint today released its Firewall Testing Methodology, updating aging testing procedures promoted by legacy testing vendors, which provide a false perception of performance and security. This traditional Firewall testing, based upon RFC 3511 and RFC 2544, was created at a time when testing vendors did not have the capabilities to test Firewalls with multi-gigabit per second speeds using stateful application traffic.

As a result, current test criteria for Firewalls are focused on specific protocols, traffic, or ports and only determine throughput and forwarding rate for unicast IP packets sent at a constant rate and packet size. This is not reflective of actual network traffic, nor does it take into consideration different features and settings now used in today’s Firewalls.

Download the Firewall Testing Methodology and view the video tutorial.

BreakingPoint Firewall Testing Methodology Accelerates Product Development

BreakingPoint CTO, Dennis Cox
“Firewalls are complex devices that no longer simply look at TCP headers or IP packs; today they incorporate technologies such as rate shaping and deep packet inspection. At the same time, Firewall testing failures and their subsequent performance and security problems in deployment has led to a reexamination of testing methods and even testing tools. People are beginning to realize that to test any network device, including Firewalls, you must provide the most realistic testing environment possible. The Firewall in your network will need to handle stateful application traffic, dynamic rule sets, live exploit tests, realistic device configuration, increasing data speeds and probably much more. You need to be testing the device in the exact same way.”

The BreakingPoint Firewall Testing Methodology provides step-by-step guidelines on how to emulate a production network environment and run a Firewall test that includes stateful application traffic, dynamic rule sets, live exploit tests, realistic device configuration, and more. Using the BreakingPoint Firewall Testing Methodology, Network Equipment Manufacturers (NEMs) and service providers will see more accurate performance and security testing results, as well as reduce their time-to-test and accelerate the development and deployment of the devices.

About BreakingPoint

BreakingPoint accelerates the development and testing of high-performance content-aware network equipment with fast, accurate, responsive, and easy-to-use application, performance and security testing tools. BreakingPoint is headquartered in Austin, Texas, with offices and customers in Canada, China, Finland, France, Germany, India, Israel, Italy, United States and the United Kingdom. For more information visit www.breakingpoint.com.

Stonesoft Uses BreakingPoint to Reduce Time-to-Test for 10-Gigabit Firewall and Intrusion Prevention Systems

Kyle Flaherty — 2008-12-09T13:48:33Z

Austin, TX – December 8, 2008 –Business relies on high-performance and secure networks that can adapt to the changing impact of new applications and threats. Network devices such as Intrusion Prevention Systems (IPS) and firewalls are critical elements in the protection of a network and the continuity of business. Stonesoft, as the innovative developer of StoneGate Firewall/VPN, IPS and SSL VPN solutions, helps protect networks with sophisticated content-aware network security equipment. These devices use granular packet inspection and intelligent event correlation capabilities to protect the network while ensuring resilient connectivity.

To properly test content-aware network security equipment Stonesoft used BreakingPoint’s:

Ability to test with realistic application traffic at 10 Gigabits per second and faster to validate the performance of its security solutions with confidence.
Out-of-the-box library of 3,700+ live security strikes and 60+ application protocols to enable realistic testing scenarios.
Flexible architecture comprised of three independent layers that work together, providing a testing environment that effectively enables a future-proof, field-upgradeable product.
Intuitive Adobe® Flash based user-interface and built-in test automation that can reduce time-to-test by 50% or more versus legacy test vendors.

BreakingPoint provides the only network equipment testing tools with the critical elements for content-aware testing; stateful application traffic blended with live security strikes and the ability to test at 10 Gigabits per second and faster.

Executive Commentary
Klaus Majewski, Vice President of Marketing at Stonesoft
“We are committed to providing our customers the best possible protection against real-life attacks, securing their information flow at all times and under all circumstances. Being able to test our product as realistically as possible is crucial for this to happen.”

Stephan Johnson, BreakingPoint Vice President of Sales, Europe
“Information flow is the cornerstone of business and with networks expanding and applications becoming more sophisticated, this also means greater need to prevent the flow of threatening network traffic. IPS and firewall devices continue to become smarter and more sophisticated; Stonesoft’s StoneGate products are a terrific example of the power of content-aware network devices. However, the testing solutions used for these new-generation equipment must also be updated, not only for proper and realistic testing, but also in order to speed up the rate of development while reducing overall cost of test.”

About Stonesoft Corporation
Stonesoft Corporation (NASDAQ OMX: SFT1V) is an innovative provider of integrated network security and resilient connectivity solutions to secure the information flow of distributed organizations. Stonesoft customers include organizations with growing needs requiring advanced network security and always-on business connectivity.
The StoneGate™ Platform unifies firewall, VPN, IPS and SSL VPN blending network security, end-to-end availability and award-winning load balancing into a centrally managed system for both physical and virtual environments. The key benefits of the StoneGate solutions include low TCO, excellent price-performance ratio and high ROI.

The StoneGate Management Center provides centralized management for StoneGate Firewall with VPN, IPS and SSL VPN. StoneGate Firewall and IPS work together to provide intelligent defense throughout the enterprise network while StoneGate SSL VPN provides enhanced security for mobile and remote use. The StoneGate Virtual Security Solutions protect the network and ensure resilient connectivity in virtual network environments.

Founded in 1990, Stonesoft Corporation is a global company with corporate headquarters in Helsinki, Finland and Americas headquarters in Atlanta, Georgia. For more information, visit www.stonesoft.com and stoneblog.stonesoft.com.

About BreakingPoint

BreakingPoint accelerates the development and testing of high-performance content-aware network equipment with fast, accurate, responsive, and easy-to-use application, performance and security testing tools. BreakingPoint is headquartered in Austin, Texas, with offices and customers in Canada, China, Finland, France, Germany, India, Israel, Italy, United States and the United Kingdom. For more information visit www.breakingpoint.com.

BreakingPoint is the First to Provide Testing Support for QQ, China’s Most Popular Instant Messaging Application

Kyle Flaherty — 2008-12-04T12:46:25Z

Austin, TX – December 2, 2008 –Instant Messaging services have become a critical communication tool throughout the world, attracting more than a billion active users to popular services such as AIM®, IRC, Jabber®, Windows® Live Messenger and Yahoo! ® Messenger. Add to this list of IM brand names, QQ IM. Developed by Tencnet Holdings, QQ is the world’s third most popular IM platform with an estimated 320 million active users, 160 million of these users in China.

Accelerating Product Development by Enhancing Testing Realism
Dennis Cox, BreakingPoint CTO:

“The popularity of the QQ application is another example of why the ability to test network equipment with a diverse set of global applications is critically important. Looking at QQ simply as another IM application is dangerous since it leverages multi-character sets, unique fonts, adware classification and has large resource usage needs. Unique applications such as QQ cause performance and stability problems for network devices. Now add to those challenges an enormous and rapidly growing global user base and it should be apparent why you must start testing your network equipment with QQ.”

Testing with Realistic Application Traffic is Critical for Global Business Communications
Working globally has become a day-to-day reality with more sophisticated networks and communications tools such as instant messaging. Market research firm Radicati Group estimates the worldwide number of IM accounts at 1.06 billion in 2007 and growing to close to 1.7 billion by 2011 , with a majority of IM now being used in business settings. Instant messaging has become a critical business communication tool, with more than half of surveyed companies using IM for business purposes, ranging from real-time customer support to marketing and sales . Unless network devices are tested properly, the traffic generated from this community of IM users leads to a strain on network performance and network security and ultimately towards negative repercussions on business.

Mr. Cox continued:
“Leveraging BreakingPoint’s presence in China, we quickly recognized the need to test with popular region-based application protocols such as QQ. We see this need for regional protocols for testing all the time as our users are consistently requesting testing coverage updates for applications or security vulnerabilities. The benefit, of course, is that the testing needs unique to BreakingPoint users in Canada, China, Finland, France, Germany, India, Israel, Italy, the U.K. or the U.S. eventually become useful features for all of our users.”

Network equipment manufacturers (NEMs) and service providers developing and deploying network devices use BreakingPoint to test equipment with a mix of real application traffic, live security strikes, and speeds of 10 gigabits per second and faster. BreakingPoint testing tools are updated consistently in order to support the most popular applications, including regional applications such as QQ IM and more than 60 additional application protocols and 3,700 security strikes, providing the most realistic network equipment testing.

About BreakingPoint

BreakingPoint accelerates the development and testing of high-performance content-aware network equipment with fast, accurate, responsive, and easy-to-use application, performance and security testing tools. BreakingPoint is headquartered in Austin, Texas, with offices and customers in Canada, China, Finland, France, Germany, India, Israel, Italy, United States and the United Kingdom. For more information visit www.breakingpoint.com.

BreakingPoint First Network Equipment Testing Solution to Generate Encrypted Peer-to-Peer (P2P) Application Traffic at 10 Gigabits per Second and Faster

Kyle Flaherty — 2008-11-05T18:21:22Z

Austin, TX – November 5, 2008 –The numbers are impressive when you look at peer-to-peer (P2P) network traffic. Recent reports estimate that more than 100 million files are exchanged each day using P2P networks and global P2P network traffic totals 61% of all upstream network traffic and 22% of downstream bandwidth consumption¹. Large numbers, but nothing compared to the growth estimates with P2P expected to surpass 100 exabytes per month by 2015².This tremendous growth makes the ability to test network equipment with stateful P2P traffic a business imperative for network equipment manufacturers (NEMs) and service providers. BreakingPoint continues to enable realistic testing for network equipment with today’s announcement of support for encrypted BitTorrent P2P traffic, along with previous coverage for eDonkey, BitTorrent, Gnutella and 60 additional application protocols—the most in the industry. This further enables NEMs and service providers to test network devices using natively generated, stateful P2P application traffic at 10 Gigabits per second and faster.

For up to the minute network equipment testing information and conversation visit www.breakingpointlabs.com.

Testing of Network Devices and Other Equipment Must Include Actual P2P Traffic

This monumental increase in P2P traffic over the last several years have service providers scrambling to find ways to ensure that network traffic is not dropped or slowed down due to malicious or inappropriate P2P traffic. Service providers are deploying network devices that optimize network traffic while managing vast P2P usage, all in an effort to provide a higher quality of experience. In order to properly test the performance and security of these devices BreakingPoint has supported P2P applications including BitTorrent and eDonkey for more than a year. This support has allowed NEMs and service providers to test network equipment using actual P2P traffic accelerated to 10 Gigabits per second and faster.

BreakingPoint is First to Provide Support for Encrypted BitTorrent

Unfortunately there are many parties that are trying to avoid the Quality of Service (QoS) policies service providers use to ensure performance by encrypting P2P data. P2P encryption is a liability to service providers through avoidance of traffic optimization or QoS policies, file obfuscation, law enforcement avoidance and exploit prevention. BreakingPoint is the only network equipment testing provider that supports testing with P2P encryption on BitTorrent, also called Message Stream Encryption. NEMs and service providers using BreakingPoint can now verify performance and security of network devices by blending P2P traffic with more than 60 additional application protocols, more than 3,600 security strikes and emulate speeds of 10 Gigabits per second and faster.

Dennis Cox, CTO, BreakingPoint Systems

“Peer-to-peer networks are constantly evolving, ultimately causing problems for any organization that is attempting to deploy technologies that manage or limit P2P usage. The devices they are using must progress at the same rate as developing P2P protocols and testing these devices using the latest protocols becomes critical. BreakingPoint supports more than 60 application protocols, not to mention more than 3,600 security strikes, and every week we provide our customers with updated applications and strikes. Your network is constantly changing in terms of devices, applications and security strikes, our goal is to make sure that when the next big thing hits, BreakingPoint users already have it to include in their testing.”

About BreakingPoint

BreakingPoint accelerates the development and testing of high-performance content-aware network equipment with fast, accurate, responsive, and easy-to-use application, performance and security testing tools. BreakingPoint is headquartered in Austin, Texas, with offices and customers in Canada, China, Finland, France, Germany, India, Israel, Italy, United States and the United Kingdom. For more information visit www.breakingpoint.com.

¹“Peer-to-Peer Networks, DRM and OSS/BSS,” by Dr. Matthew Lucas, 3/1/2007 and “Sandvine Releases Global Internet Traffic Trends Report,”, 10/21/2008

² “The Discovery Institute: Estimating the Exaflood,” by Bret Swanson & George Gilder, 1/29/2008

BreakingPoint Continues to Provide Most Comprehensive Microsoft® Tuesday Coverage in the Network Equipment Testing Industry

Kyle Flaherty — 2008-10-16T16:12:21Z

Austin, TX – October 16, 2008

News Facts

BreakingPoint is the only company that provides comprehensive security tests for its users within 24 hours of Microsoft's Patch Tuesday release.
Earlier this week all BreakingPoint users were provided with updated security tests for the October 2008 Microsoft vulnerabilities.
BreakingPoint provides the industry’s fastest, most accurate, responsive and easy-to-use application, performance and security testing product, providing unprecedented realism, session performance, throughput and ease-of-use features.
Realism and ease-of-use has been taken to a new level with BreakingPoint’s ability to provide the most comprehensive Microsoft Tuesday coverage.
Manufacturers and users of application servers, firewalls, Intrusion Prevention Systems (IPS) and more can now quickly test all network equipment for Microsoft vulnerabilities, saving valuable time and quickly patching those devices that are most vulnerable.
More information and the latest security updates can be found at www.breakingpointlabs.com.

News Quotes

Director of BreakingPoint Labs, H D Moore
“The second Tuesday of every month is a busy time at BreakingPoint; myself and the rest of the security team drop everything and focus entirely on the patches released by Microsoft. Our team grabs the patches as soon as they drop, often hours before actual security bulletins are posted. We split up the patches across the team and get to work, analyzing the patched binaries, reproducing the flaws, and writing exploit code. Each exploit is expanded into specific test cases, which are then uploaded by the BreakingPoint Labs team to the Strike Center for our users to update their BreakingPoint product. Within 24 hours of the Microsoft Tuesday release, our customers are using these Strikes to verify their security solutions and write new signatures when necessary.”

CTO and Co-founder of BreakingPoint Systems, Dennis Cox
“Every Tuesday companies scramble to patch their networks and protect themselves, a demanding process in terms of time and cost. The same certainly goes for network equipment manufacturers and service providers, who actually have the unique problem of testing a plethora of disparate network equipment, quickly and realistically, to determine which is vulnerable. Making it quick and easy to test your equipment with these bugs, and just as quickly understanding your vulnerabilities, is what we provide BreakingPoint users. Testing is a necessity for performance and security, but it also should be as painless as possible.”

October 2008 Microsoft Vulnerability Coverage
The October 15th StrikePack (35616) includes thirty-nine Strikes that cover eight Microsoft Bulletins and twelve CVE identifiers:

MS08-057 – Microsoft Excel (24 Strikes)
MS08-058 – Internet Explorer (5 Strikes)
MS08-059 – Host Integration Server (6 Strikes)
MS08-060 – Active Directory (1 Strike)
MS08-062 – Internet Printing Service (1 Strike)
MS08-063 – Windows SMB Service (1 Strike)
MS08-065 – Microsoft Message Queue (1 Strike)

About BreakingPoint

BreakingPoint accelerates the development and testing of high-performance content-aware network equipment with fast, accurate, responsive, and easy-to-use application, performance and security testing tools. BreakingPoint is headquartered in Austin, Texas, with offices and customers in Canada, China, Finland, France, Germany, India, Israel, Italy, United States and the United Kingdom. For more information visit www.breakingpoint.com.

BreakingPoint Announces Competitive Trade Up Program for Network Equipment Testing Products

Kyle Flaherty — 2008-10-07T14:42:23Z

Austin, TX--October 7, 2008--BreakingPoint Announces Competitive Trade Up Program for Network Equipment Testing Products

News Facts:

BreakingPoint, headquartered in Austin, TX, provides a new generation of testing solutions that validate network equipment performance and functionality using the most realistic conditions to accelerate development, speed time-to-market and reduce R&D, QA and operations costs.
BreakingPoint today launched a competitive upgrade offer designed to help Network Equipment Manufacturers (NEMs) and Service Providers move from rigid legacy testing tools to the BreakingPoint Elite.
BreakingPoint Elite is the industry’s fastest, most accurate, responsive and easy-to-use application, performance and security testing product.
BreakingPoint Elite provides unprecedented realism, session performance, throughput and ease-of-use features. BreakingPoint Elite is the ONLY network equipment testing product to generate:

15 million concurrent TCP sessions and 1.5 million TCP sessions per second
20 Gigabits per second of Layer 4-7 traffic in a 4 rack unit chassis
80 Gigabits per second Layer 2-3 traffic in a 4 rack unit chassis

BreakingPoint Breakthrough Performance program runs through December 31, 2008 and offers up to a 50% discount on BreakingPoint Elite when trading in legacy test equipment from Agilent®, Ixia® or Spirent®.

Links for more information:
Trade Up Program Information

BreakingPoint Elite Information

BreakingPoint Elite Data Sheet

BreakingPoint Labs Blog

Follow BreakingPoint on Twitter

About BreakingPoint

BreakingPoint accelerates the development and testing of high-performance content-aware network equipment with fast, accurate, responsive, and easy-to-use application, performance and security testing tools. BreakingPoint is headquartered in Austin, Texas, with offices and customers in Canada, China, Finland, France, Germany, India, Israel, Italy, United States and the United Kingdom. For more information visit www.breakingpoint.com.