The high-end of the firewall market has really been dominated by two companies: Crossbeam Systems (with Check Point Software) and Juniper Networks. Over the past few years, these two firms won most of the high revenue/high margin enterprise and service provider deals.

Of course, others took notice and wanted their own piece of the pie. Cisco came out with its ASA 5580 a few years back. Network security guru Sourcefire introduced a high-end hardware architecture and a firewall in 2011. Finally, Check Point jumped in with its own high-end hardware as well.

As if this space wasn’t crowded enough, F5 Networks threw its hat in the ring this week with the announcement that its Big-IP 11.1 software passed the ISCA Labs test for network firewalls.

This may seem like just another feature for Big-IP but it’s not. F5 has a unique position amongst its competitors because:

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As they grapple with a growing crop of increasingly sophisticated threats that know no political borders, nations must dramatically improve their framework for coordinating on cybersecurity policy and preventing and responding to attacks, according to a new study sponsored by security software vendor McAfee.

McAfee commissioned the Security and Defense Agenda (SDA), a prominent think tank based in Brussels, to canvas global leaders and cybersecurity experts for the report entitled, “Cybersecurity: The Vexed Question of Global Rules,” released at an event here on Monday.

The authors of the report emphasized the need for sharing information about threats in real time, both among nations around the globe and between the public and private sectors in any given country.

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The Internal Revenue Service and the Department of Justice teamed up for a coast-to-coast crackdown on identity thieves this week.

The coast-to-coast law enforcement onslaught arrested 105 people in 23 states and included indictments, arrests and the execution of search warrants involving the potential theft of thousands of identities and taxpayer refunds, the IRS stated. In all, 939 criminal charges are included in the 69 indictments and information related to identity theft.

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Can industry heavyweights Google, PayPal, Microsoft and AOL — along with 11 others in high-tech such as Facebook and LinkedIn, as well as the financial world’s Bank of America and Fidelity Investments — succeed in stopping phishing attacks right in their tracks? In uniting behind an effort called DMARC.org unveiled today, the group says it can through policy-based steps filter out spoofed email that attackers use for phishing.

“Whether you are an enterprise or offering a consumer service, you can apply this policy now,” says Brett McDowell, senior manager of customer security initiatives at PayPal, who is chairman of the organization DMARC, which stands for “Domain-based Message Authentication, Reporting and Conformance.” The DMARC.org site today published guidelines and the specification for its technology, which makes use of the well-known standards Sender Policy Framework (SPF) and DomainKeys Identified Mail (DKIM), two basic approaches widely used today for authenticating email.

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