StoneGate™ Firewall/VPN appliance achieves a world first in Checkmark Firewall Certification to Level 1, Level 2 and VPN

HELSINKI, Finland and ATLANTA, U.S. —May 11, 2004—Stonesoft Corporation (HEX: SFT1V), an innovative provider of integrated network security and business continuity, today announced that following extensive Checkmark testing, the company’s StoneGate Firewall and VPN solution has become the first Firewall/VPN appliance in the world to achieve Checkmark Certification for Firewall Levels 1 and 2 plus VPN.

The Checkmark award is a global certification that confirms that StoneGate meets a rigorous and advanced level of certification.

• The Firewall Checkmark Level 1 is designed to ensure that firewalls achieve a basic level of protection against a number of common hostile attacks, from both inside and outside the organization.

• The Firewall Checkmark Level 2 is designed to ensure that firewalls achieve an advanced level of protection against hostile attacks from both inside and outside the organization, and meet requirements for management, administration and performance.

• The Checkmark VPN test is designed to ensure that VPNs achieve a basic level of security performance in that they allow a secure point-to-point link between two networks, between a roaming client and a network (optional) and enforce a reasonable level of encryption and data integrity for the data contained with the VPN tunnel 6.

The certified VPNs also provide a secure key-exchange mechanism for all devices participating in a VPN, provide authentication and access control mechanisms to restrict resource access on a per-user or per-group level and provide packet filtering or proxy services within the tunnel to restrict tunnel traffic to specific protocols or source/destination points.

Checkmark is regarded as a leading global standard of computer security product effectiveness. The testing processes conducted by West Coast Labs, reflect real world scenarios in a state-of-the-art laboratory environment.

This prestigious award is an acknowledgement of Stonesoft’s excellence in security products and its commitment to ensuring that all products meet recognized industry standards. Ilkka Hiidenheimo, Stonesoft founder and CTO, comments: “Security is a very sensitive topic within organizations.

Security and IT directors need to be confident that the product they are investing in can not only do the job, but has also gone through extensive testing and certification by third-party organizations such as West Coast Labs. We are very pleased to hear that our StoneGate Firewall and VPN solution has achieved the certification on various levels from such a high-quality testing and certification service as Checkmark.”

Chris Thomas, Operations Director at West Coast Labs added “Congratulations to Stonesoft for being the first company in the world to achieve the Checkmark standard on Firewal Levels 1, 2 and VPN. Our testing scenarios are extremely meticulous – that StoneGate passed such a rigorous testing process is testimony to Stonesoft’s commitment to providing best of breed Firewall and VPN products.”

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