Intrusion Prevention System

You may be wondering what exactly an Intrusion Prevention System (IPS) is and how it can help your organization.

An Intrusion Prevention System is a network security and threat management prevention tool that examines traffic flows to detect and prevent vulnerability exploits. These exploits usually come in the form of malicious inputs used to a target an application or service. The bad actors try to interrupt and gain control of an application or machine. If successful, the attacker can disable the target application, and can also potentially access all the rights and permissions to the compromised application.

Whether the IPS is a hardware device or software, it continuously monitors the entire network for suspicious activity and takes action to prevent it. These actions include:

• Sending an alarm to the administrator
• Dropping the malicious packets
• Blocking traffic from the source address
• Resetting the connection

Intrusion Prevention Systems are more advanced than an intrusion detection system (IDS). An IDS only detects malicious activity, but unfortunately cannot take action against it beyond alerting an administrator. Intrusion prevention systems are sometimes included as part of a Generation Firewall or Unified Threat Management (UTM) solution. In addition, they must be powerful enough to scan a high volume of traffic without slowing down performance.

It is critical to keep in mind that an IPS is only one part of a robust security solution — it needs to work with other technology for maximum effectiveness. If you’re ready to take your systems to the next level, get in touch with LayerZoom today.