UTM Appliance: Fortigate 80C UTM

With so many security attacks in 2011 on large enterprises, security is going to be a major concern for most enterprises this year. Almost all companies have significant online presence or have employees that have online access. But the question is how to prevent unauthorized parties to breach the security perimeter? Fortigate 80C is one such product that provides security for your network and also manages the bandwidth by blocking unwanted websites.

Installing the UTM

Installing this product is easy. Once you log on, a dashboard shows the status of different parameters such as license information, system information, traffic history, etc. You can add more widgets if you want. We first checked the web filter to find out how good it is at blocking websites. Under the web filter option you get different categories like bandwidth consumed, security risks, adult/mature content, etc. These categories have further sub-categories. We checked job search and social networking under General Interest- Personal category. Here you have the option to check HTTPS Scanning, to exclude banking and healthcare websites. Other options include web URL filtering and web content filtering, but in order for them to work you have to enter certain commands in the CLI Console provided.

Security features

For opening websites there are certain checks available: allow, monitor, warning, authenticate and block. We set the action as block for searching of jobs and as authenticate for social networking sites. For authentication we set a username and password. We checked the UTM option under Policy to add a profile. After successfully applying the policies we tried to open the job websites. It successfully blocked the job search websites and in social networking it asked for authentication. After we had added the username and password, we were able to open social networking websites. Such authentication option is helpful when you want to grant permission to select people only. Next we tried to open the websites through proxy websites. We successfully opened job websites but there is a solution to avoid this as well. In the UTM Profile tab, a category is provided for proxy websites under Potentially Liable-> Proxy Avoidance. After enabling it we were not able to open websites even through proxy websites.

Securing IMs and email

Another security concern is the use of IMs in office, which this product is able to block very easily. We tried to block Google Talk through Application Sensor present under UTM Profiles->Application control and we successfully blocked it. Other features include email filtering, antivirus, and DLP. We checked the product for email filtering also. We tried to block the emails containing a specific word in the subject. After applying the specific policies, when we tried to send an email to the machine with the mail client, the mail was not sent. We received a message that your mail is blocked because it consists a blocked word. You can check the email logs also. We got statistics of all mails we received and sent under the UTM Profile-> Monitor option. If you want to check the logs and reports then you can open the Logs and Reports tab. Here you can see the websites visited by you and also the policy in case a website is blocked along with the source port and ID.

Bottomline: Fortigate 80C is a decent security solution which is also very easy to configure and use.