Yoggie Security Network & Wireless Cards Driver Download For Windows

Yoggie Security Systems(TM) (www.yoggie.com) established in 2005 by Shlomo Touboul - the inventor of Behavior Based Blocking Technology - is the developer of the world's first hardware-based computer security solution. Yoggie Security Systems makes great hardware-based security devices for business travellers. From the diminutive Firestick Pico to the Gatekeeper Pro, Yoggie has your back covered; and for those.

• Yoggie Security Network Services
• Yoggie Security Network & Wireless Cards Driver Download For Windows Xp

Hotel business centers, airport WiFi hotspots, your local Starbucks: as far as the corporate laptop is concerned, these are the badlands where it is at its most vulnerable.

Laptops are generally well protected against all kinds of malware and hacker threats by security appliances (such as the Astaro Security Gateway, and Smoothwall’s SmoothGuard, both covered here) when connected to the corporate network. But in the external environments mentioned above, laptops are on their own: the only protection they can expect is from any security software they are running.

The problem with security software suites is that they can get corrupted or disabled by malware (or inadvertently by the user,) and ultimately they are reactive—they have to let threats on to the computer before they deal with them. And just to add insult to injury, they usually slow computers down quite considerably as well.

Yoggie, a privately owned Israeli company, believes that a better solution for laptops users is to place their computers behind some sort of hardware-based security device before connecting to the Internet from a public access point. Since a 1U form-factor rackable appliance is out of the question, Yoggie has designed the Gatekeeper Pico, a Linux based security appliance crammed on to what appears to be a USB memory stick.

The “memory stick” actually contains an ARM-based CPU and an operating system built on the Linux 2.6 kernel stored in read-only memory. It also contains a suite of security software, including Kaspersky anti-virus and anti-spyware, Surf Control Web filtering, Mailshell anti-spam and anti-phishing, Snort intrusion detection and prevention, plus other security applications including a firewall that have been developed in house.

Once the Yoggie installation software has been run and the Gatekeeper Pico is inserted into a laptop’s USB port, all incoming TCP/IP traffic is diverted to the device to be screened and sanitized before being sent back to the laptop’s Windows or Mac OS X operating system. So just like a security appliance that sits at a corporate network gateway sanitizing traffic before allowing it on the network, it is the Yoggie device that receives and deals with any attacks intended for the laptop.

A browser-based control panel allows the user to configure the appliance, with controls including a simple slider for “low”, “medium” and “high” levels of security, and dials that display the number of threats detected and an overall threat level. Advanced users can go beneath the simple interface to configure individual elements of the device’s software manually.

Keeping Yoggie Up to Date

Several measures have been taken to try to ensure that the appliance is effective. Firstly, the Gatekeeper Pico receives new anti-virus signatures and any other patches from Yoggie’s severs every time it connects to the Internet, and these are stored on the device in a section of flash memory. There is enough capacity on the device for several years’ worth of updates, according to the company.

Secondly, once a laptop has had a Yoggie device installed on it, it checks that the device has been inserted before allowing access to the Internet to prevent users forgetting. What happens if it gets lost? If this happens there’s the option to connect to the Internet without the device, after first entering a password. Doing so might be considered rash without some sort of security software installed on the laptop itself, so it would seem sensible to keep some on the laptop in case the device gets lost. Download tora laptops & desktops driver.

This of course negates one of the advantages of the device touted by the company: that while security software often causes a significant performance hit (of up to 30 percent, according to Yoggie, although this sounds a little high), the USB device only causes a 1 percent hit.

Yoggie for the Enterprise

For enterprise use the company also offers the Gatekeeper Pico Pro (for Windows machines only ), a device similar in most respects to the Gatekeeper Pico. One of the key differences is that Pro devices can be managed and updated centrally by a corporate IT department using a hardware device called the Yoggie Management Server (YMS).

An administrator using the YMS can then take control of a fleet of up to 500 Gatekeeper Pico Pros, creating sets of rules for different groups of users defined in Active Directory. For example, they could give some users access to a limited selection of web sites and bar them from using FTP when traveling with their laptops, while others could have unlimited Internet access. It’s also possible to prevent laptops connecting to the Internet at all except through the device: a password based override feature would no longer be possible.

The Pro version of the device also contains seven popular VPN clients including Cisco and Juniper software.

Yoggie Pros and Cons

So is the Yoggie Gatekeeper Pro a useful piece of security kit? Since laptops can be configured by the IT department so they can connect to the Internet only when the Gatekeeper Pico Pro is inserted, it does ensure that anti-virus and other security software is protecting the machine at all times. By contrast, as mentioned before, a software only solution could be uninstalled or disabled by the user or by malware. In this respect the system works a little like an enhanced version of NAC (network access control): whereas a NAC device prevents users from connecting to the corporate network without up to date security software running, the Gatekeeper Pico Pro prevents any connection to any network without its protection.

On the other hand it is not hard to imagine that a small device such as this could easily get mislaid. It is also very flimsy, made from thin plastic which looks like it could easily be broken. A user with a laptop and a lost or broken Gatekeeper Pico Pro is effectively cut off from the Internet unless they can contact the IT department and override the block on Internet access without the Pico Pro in place. And if that is allowed then inevitably some form of security software will have to be left on the laptop itself, negating any speed gains that might be possible by running security software on a separate hardware device instead of the laptop. (It’s probably a good idea to leave anti-virus software on the laptop anyway, to deal with any viruses that may already be present when the Gatekeeper Pico Pro is first installed.)

There’s also a question mark over the software installed on the device. Open source security software or products from well known security vendors may well be trustworthy, but the company is less than forthcoming about the software that it has developed. Who is to judge whether any proprietary security software provided by Yoggie is well architected and free from serious flaws? Only time and extensive testing in the field will tell.

That just leaves the question of the price. At $199 each the Gatekeeper Pico Pro is certainly not cheap, and there’s also an annual subscription after year one of $40. The YMS adds another $2,700 or so to the bill.

But the idea of a pocket-sized security appliance with a significant amount of open-source (and therefore scrutinizable) software is undeniably attractive, as is the centralized management provided by the YMS. For companies that can justify the cost, the Yoggie could be an attractive security solution.

Author: Joseph Moran
Review Date: 5/3/2007

These days you can scarcely turn on a computer without exposing it to some kind of security threat, and few situations carry a greater risk than a roving laptop connecting to myriad public networks, like Wi-Fihotspots.

Using a software firewall is commonplace in such a scenario, but Yoggie Security Systems says it has a better solution in the form of its Yoggie Gatekeeper, a tiny security appliance that's designed to protect your laptop from network-based threats. The Gatekeeper packs a number of security features into a single compact and portable device, including a firewall, anti-virus, anti-spam, anti-phishing, anti-spyware functions and content filtering. The Gatekeeper also provides Web and e-mail proxies, a VPN client and an intrusion detection system.

So why would you forgo the convenience of security software installed directly on your PC for an external device? First, much like the hardware firewalls used by corporate networks, the Gatekeeper uses it's physical separation as an advantage, acting as an airlock between the safe zone (your PC) and the unsafe zone (the network it's connected to and the Internet beyond). Second, the Gatekeeper will offload security functions from your laptop's processor and RAM, thus freeing it for other tasks. (The Gatekeeper sports the same 520 MHz Intel XScale processor currently found in many high-end handheld devices, and has 128 MB of its own memory.) Another distinct benefit of an external hardware device is that it tends to be more reliable and less vulnerable to attack than a software firewall that must run atop an operating system.

The Gatekeeper, with its dimensions of 4.0125- x 2- x .875-inches, makes efficient use of its small footprint. A captive USB cable stores wrapped around the device, concealing a pair of RJ-45 Ethernet ports. The rear of the device sports an SD (Secure Digital) memory card slot and AC power jack behind a protective rubber cover. An AC power supply is optional, because the Gatekeeper can draw its operating power from your laptop's USB port.

Operating Modes
You can use the Gatekeeper in either pass-through or redirect mode, and the one you choose depends mainly on whether your laptop uses a wired or wireless network connection. In pass-through mode, the Gatekeeper's two RJ-45 ports are connected to the PC's Ethernet jack (it includes an 18-inch cable) as well as to the network connection that's providing Internet access.

Of course, this kind of connection isn't feasible on a notebook that connects wirelessly (be it Wi-Fi or something like a cellular modem), which brings us to the Gatekeeper's redirect mode. In redirect mode, the Gatekeeper's USB connection serves as a conduit for both power and data, and a special network driver (which is currently available only for Windows XP) shunts all incoming traffic to the Gatekeeper for inspection before being released to the operating system for processing.

Although pass-through mode has the advantage of not requiring any software to be installed on the laptop (which makes this mode compatible with any operating system), as well as preserving the pure physical separation of network traffic, redirect mode has a few benefits of its own. One is the presence of a Windows tray icon that provides a quick visual indication of your protection status, along with event-notification balloons. That's helpful, because although the Gatekeeper has a number of status lights on its front panel, they're far too small and dim to convey any useful information.

Installation
We attached the Gatekeeper (in redirect mode) to a wireless-equipped Windows XP notebook and found the setup procedure to be pretty painless. Upon installation, the Gatekeeper's driver software inserted itself into the notebook's network protocol stack so it could monitor and intercept traffic. In redirect mode, network access is disabled whenever the Gatekeeper isn't physically connected to the computer (and sure enough, when we pulled the plug on the Gatekeeper our connection terminated).

While a few functions -- like changing the device's administrative password and temporarily disabling protection -- are directly accessible via the tray icon, most Gatekeeper configuration takes place using the Web browser. Not that there's much you have to do to the Gatekeeper up front to make it useful out of the box. Much like the security software you'd run on a PC, the Gatekeeper starts operating immediately and is pre-configured with certain default settings that provide a fairly high level of protection.

Usage
You can set the Gatekeeper to one of three broad security postures -- low, medium (the default) or high, but unfortunately there's no way to see the specifics of each one or to make adjustments to the configuration. That's not necessarily a problem for many people (too many options often creates confusion, and thus reduces security), but it could be an issue for people who want more control over their computing environment. As it turns out, you can manually fine-tune only a handful of Gatekeeper options, such as opening specific firewall ports or adjusting Web content filters.

Our Gatekeeper did a pretty good job of protecting our test system from a variety of digital nasties. We subjected it to several test viruses, firewall leak tests, phishing Web sites and spam mail, and it identified and/or blocked each threat as appropriate. In the case of spam, the Gatekeeper doesn't actually block it but rather tags it as spam, probable spam or as phishing mail, which you can then filter via your mail client.

One thing to keep in mind when using redirect mode is that the Gatekeeper is a USB 1.1 device, an interface with a potential throughput of a mere 12 Mbps and real-world throughput of roughly half that. This won't be a significant bottleneck in a typical hotspot scenario or anywhere you perform typical workaday tasks (e.g. browsing and e-mail). But should you attempt bandwidth-intensive tasks like large file transfers, it could potentially throttle the performance of a high-speed wireless connection (not to mention 100 Mbps Ethernet).

If you want to see what the Gatekeeper's been doing on your behalf, you can check the browser-based main status page, which provides simple speedometer-like counters of suspicious activity. For more detail you can access security and system logs, as well as various attractive and informative rotating 3D charts illustrating the threats that have been encountered.

Pricing
The Gatekeeper's $220 purchase price buys you the hardware plus a subscription for a year's worth of updates. Also included in the purchase price is a one-year license for Kaspersky Anti-Virus software, which may seem redundant until you remember that the network isn't the only way virus can infect your laptop. Gatekeeper subscriptions after the first year are currently priced at $40

The Gatekeeper is also available in a SoHo bundle, which is licensed for use by up to five systems. Pricing for this version wasn't finalized as of this writing, but the company says the bundle will be nominally more expensive than a standalone Gatekeeper and include the AC power adapter. Larger organizations that want to deploy Gatekeepers en masse can opt for a $5,000 Yoggie Management Server (YMS), a rack-mounted server that offers centralized management and reporting for up to 500 Gatekeepers. The company says that the YMS also gives corporate administrators far more detailed information about and control over the Yoggie's configuration options than you get with the standalone product.

You can look at the Yoggie Gatekeeper as an Internet security suite that comes in a plastic box rather than a cardboard one. Sharp mobile phones & portable devices driver. Although it's several times the price of a typical software firewall and somewhat less convenient due to having an extra piece of hardware to carry around, many people will find the improved security, reliability and operating system flexibility (at least in pass-through mode) worth the trade-offs.

Price: $220 (includes one-year of security updates; subsequent years are $40)

Pros: more reliable than a software firewall; offloads security functions from laptop processor and memory; universal operating system compatibility when used in pass-through mode

Yoggie Security Network Services

Cons: relatively expensive and less convenient than a software firewall; pass-through mode not available with wireless connections, USB 1.1 could be a performance bottleneck in certain situations Microsoft usb 2.0 driver download windows 10.

Joe Moran spent six years as an editor and analyst with Ziff-Davis Publishing and several more as a freelance product reviewer. He's also worked in technology public relations and as a corporate IT manager, and he's currently principal of Neighborhood Techs, a technology service firm in Naples, Fla. He holds several industry certifications, including Microsoft Certified Systems Engineer (MCSE) and Cisco Certified Network Associate (CCNA).

Yoggie Security Network & Wireless Cards Driver Download For Windows Xp

Adapted fromSmallBusinessComputing.