Well that would be the usual boring answer from the guy down at the pub who isn’t really entering in to the spirit of the conversation. How about this one… Be shot out of a cannon – that’s pretty dangerous. But with a little thought we can make it safer. For a start, how big is the cannon? Where is it aiming? Can I wear a crash helmet? Can I land in a very large safety net? Can I get someone else to do it for me?

Of course, reading email can be a pretty dangerous business to, with all those requests from your bank, or someone else’s bank, to make sure you validate your password just one more time. Or the links to special interest web sites eager to part you from you money. Or even some distant relative desperate to give you a share of those millions you thought were lost forever.

Of course we take precautions here, too, looking left and right, not doing anything stupid. But what if we are taken over by a feeling of wanting to know just what it would be like to be shot from a cannon?

The tempting invitation for the Cannon Shoot arriving in your inbox in the first place meant that your first antispam line of defence has been breached. Of course, you could still have some client software installed, but that has also failed you this time. So you click the Cannon Shoot registration, but the site has been blocked by your content filtering safety net, phew! Someone’s been busy rating dodgy websites on your behalf. Had you been able to access the site, download that little software application, then you too could soon be hosting your own Cannon Shoot. Of course a compromised PC would still need to be able to install this little piece of malware. Even if that happened,  here again someone has been working on your behalf making sure that even in this worst case, that software you’d installed wouldn’t be able to call home for the latest invitation instructions for the Cannon Shoot.

If we didn’t have antispam, content filtering, antivirus, and intrusion protection defences, pretty soon it wouldn’t be safe to cross the road, you’d be dodging all those crash helmet clad cannon balls flying up the street.

Today was another big milestone in the history of the company I co-founded and I’m very happy to have this opportunity to tell you about it. Fortinet has released FortiOS 4.0, the firmware upgrade for our FortiGate security systems. This release is the result of a tremendous effort by our development teams over the better part of 12+ months. These highly skilled and talented teams worked hard to design and implement these technology innovations so that we could confidently put the product in front of our customers.

Even in this time of economic uncertainty, I believe that innovation is our greatest strength. While other security vendors are merely coasting along, Fortinet is focused more than ever on expanding our vision for comprehensive and easily managed network security solutions. We are continuously updating our FortiOS firmware and each release builds upon our existing, pioneering innovations. For example, with FortiOS 3.0, Fortinet became the first security hardware company to offer VoIP / IM / P2P security; we were also the first security vendor to deliver integrated SSL VPN with complete content inspection. We’ve now built upon that technology to offer full application control and prioritization of more than 1,000 apps. Overall, our FortiOS 4.0 release delivers on two main objectives:

1. Give our FortiGate customers access to security technologies and features that were previously only available via a combination of standalone vendors
2. Continue to drive the increased security capabilities that help protect our customers from the never-ending and evolving threat landscape

FortiOS 4.0 introduces several features, the four most significant of which I want to highlight here:

• Application Control
• Data Leakage Prevention
• WAN Optimization
• SSL Inspection

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