Check Point IPS Reviews

I use Check Point IPS to prevent attacks, such as malware, spyware, and any other malicious activity.

What I like best about Check Point IPS is that it can prevent attacks. I also like that it has a log feature.

The hardware-based version of Check Point IPS could be more scalable. Right now, it's not scalable.

I've been working with Check Point IPS for two to three years.

Stability-wise, Check Point IPS is eight out of ten.

Check Point IPS is a scalable solution if it's cloud-based, but if it's hardware-based, it isn't scalable. Scalability-wise, it's a six out of ten.

The Check Point IPS technical support is excellent portal-wise and callback-wise, so it's a nine out of ten.

Setting up Check Point IPS is straightforward.

Before I deploy Check Point IPS, I'll put it on IDS mode, and then I'll see the current user activity, any malicious activity, and the logs. I then switch to the IPS mode.

You can pay for Check Point IPS yearly, or you can go with a three-year license. There's no extra cost apart from the standard licensing fee.

My company has two hundred users of Check Point IPS.

I recommend Check Point IPS to others because it's scalable, reliable, and easily managed by all users.

My rating for Check Point IPS is eight out of ten.

My primary use case for Check Point IPS is very simple: I first identify some signature behaviors and secure levels and then I apply some signatures. I usually do not deploy IPS from CheckPoint. Overall, I manage signatures.

The Check Point IPS feature I find the most valuable is the firewall. It is great and easy to work with. 

I'm not sure what I really like in IPS because it's automated. You read the permit and you try to apply the signature and read the behavior of the solution and find how to fix it. So I don't think Check Point IPS is a great solution. 

I don't I like working with it very much because there's other stuff you can do to have more information. However, Check Point IPS does prevent important attacks easily.

What I would like to improve in IPS would be the capacity of the hardware. I would also like to be able to sort signatures by severity. This would greatly impact how well I can manage my environment. 

In the next release, I would like to see automatic signature deployment. 

I have been using Check Point IPS for nearly a year now. 

On a scale of one to ten, with one being the worst and ten being the best, I would rate Check Point IPS an eight. 

The product protects our environment from specific threats; we 'approve' signatures manually (or automatically) based on the applications/appliances in use in our company. We are a logistics company hosting several websites/order management. The company is about 1000 FTE across several locations (in the Netherlands & Belgium). We have been using this for the last 10 years at least (since I have worked at the company). It's easy to use. The reporting is good. Usually, when threats emerge on the internet, there are signatures for this within a few hours.  

We manually approve the signatures daily, for the software/appliances that we use. Based on the experience of the administrator, we prevent threats if they are present in our network; and we sometimes use the signatures in detect mode to gather intelligence (for instance to detect TLS1.0/TLS1.1 usage through the firewall). 

This has helped us to identify several key webservers that would be vulnerable to 'downgrade attacks'. We could easily identify the vulnerable servers and remediate the issue based on the information we got from the reports we can generate. 

The quick updates of the signatures when a new threat is identified are great. For instance, when Microsoft releases patches, we usually see new signatures for those issues that have to be patched in a day. This gives us time to test/deploy the patches while already being protected from the threats. 

Also, it's very good with reporting. I can generate reports for management automatically based on the threats of the last day/week/whatever is needed. 

It also clearly states the performance impact of a signature and the 'confidence' of a signature so you can quickly evaluate if you need to start panicking or not.

Sometimes protections are 'aggregated' into a single threat name when you look at the logs. I would prefer to see all protections named individually (for example, right now, 'web enforcement' is a category that contains several signatures). 

I also wish there was an option to run reports of the individual signature 'usage'; it's not easy to generate views based on the number of 'hits' a signature has generated. (it is possible, however, there could be an easier option). For example, if you have a signature activated, for instance, a MS issue then patch your environment, it's 'hard' to identify if the individual signature has been 'hit'.

I personally have used the solution since December 2012 - almost 10 years.

It's very stable. I haven't seen issues with signatures, downloading, or implementing the signatures, or the 'hits' that it generates. 

The product is very scalable; if you size your requirements properly when buying and don't 'prevent all signatures' and customize it for your environment. 

Customer support is fine. We have a vendor we use, and, if needed, can fall back on Check Point (I had a few very good remote sessions when we had issues with our firewall; no issues were seen with IDS/IPS). 

Positive

The company I work for has used it since I've worked there; no switching was needed. We are happy with the solution. 

When implementing the solution, you must activate the blade on your firewall and decide if you want to do it manually or automatically and then (when doing it manually) approve/detect/ignore the relevant signatures. It is pretty straightforward. 

We had a vendor team install the firewall and handle the basic configuration, then we went on training. In terms of implementation, I can do it myself now. The vendor team was very good and had a high level of expertise. 

I'm a network admin; not involved in the money.

I'd advise users to bundle the things they want; so they get a cheaper offer. 

We've had the same solution since I've worked there.

I am happy with the solution and have been using it since i started working for the company (10 years now). I dont want to be without it.

The Check Point Intrusion Prevention System can block traffic from any source workstation inside our local network and facilitates the analysis of outbound traffic to check if there is any risk in the internal network in order to protect our clients and servers. With this product, we're creating a secure zone. We currently are using this blade in our hybrid environment and it's integrated with our secure gateway. Most of the time, our NOC team continuously monitors traffic in order to find any suspicious activity.

Now that the Check Point Intrusion Prevention System has improved our environment, we feel that we are more protected in our network. By implementing the recommendations that Check Point has given us, we have an optimal security environment now that provides almost real-time detection and prevention. We are protected by the Intrusion Prevention System and can go back and select any period or severity in order to display the latest statistics.

Check Point Intrusion Prevention System has great profiles, and we can continuously create, modify, activate, deactivate or configure any specific setting to allow the profile to focus on just one thing or for certain attacks. I also like that profiles can be applied to groups of workstations that need to be more protected from possible attacks. Each profile that we create has activated protections and some instructions of what the IPS should do with the traffic.

At the moment, I do not see what else can be added to this service. In my experience, I've seen that it has what we need without something additional being required. 

It is easy to use, easy to configure, and practically updates itself without the need to intervene as an administrator of the appliance. We are happy with this platform since it allows us to have security and control over the connections almost in real-time. There are many different services that Check Point Intrusion Prevention System has that are quite useful.

I've been using the solution for about four years.

I've found the stability to be good.

The scalability is great.

Technical support has been great,

Positive

I did not previously use a different solution.

The initial setup was not complex. 

We handled the implementation process in-house.

I've witnessed a 40% ROI.

The cost is a bit high but it is worth it.

I did evaluate other options before choosing Check Point.

So far, I have no regrets about choosing this solution.

IPS is part of our Check Point Firewall Solution and a key function in securing our infrastructure. It is good to have an instance already on the gateway that protects specific services from attacks.

Very often, patch installations and downtimes cannot be implemented immediately in the case of critical security vulnerabilities.

IPS helps to secure short-term security vulnerabilities with its regular signature updates. The variety of products being covered is always impressive.

IPS is a key instance to secure services behind our Gateway.

Online attacks and malware have been evolving, using sophisticated and even evasive attack methods. Check Point addresses the changing threat landscape while meeting several key operational requirements for Intrusion Prevention Systems. Check Point IPS protections include checks for protocol and behavioral anomalies which means they detect vulnerabilities in well-known protocols such as HTTP, SMTP, POP, and IMAP before an exploit is found.

If you have any doubt if an update might interfere with any of your services, you can just mark it as "detect only" and observe how it behaves.

IPS easily allows follow-up flags on recently updated patterns. If, in rare cases, a false positive does occur, it is quickly detected and an exception can be easily created.

Basically, it is easy to use and offers a wide variety of protections through all kinds of software, services, appliances, and IoT-Devices. Updates are available regularly and can be easily downloaded and deployed through all the infrastructure. Rollback is easy to perform if ever something happens. It is a must-have on each gateway.

Usually, new signatures for known vulnerabilities come very quickly. In some cases, I would have liked the updates to be faster.

I am not aware of a preview channel or some repository to have a preview on upcoming signatures, however, this would be nice to have.

There is not too much else I am missing on Check Point Intrusion Prevention.

We've used the solution for years now.

We have no concerns at all when it comes to stability. 

We've never reached a performance limit.

Technical support is responsive and helpful.

Positive

I've worked with Check Point for years now.

The setup process is straightforward. I'd recommend others join a CCSA training to cover the required knowledge.

We implemented through our vendor and they were very experienced.

I've worked with other vendors before - however, of those that I've used, I found they didn't offer the whole package under one admin console.

We have a hybrid infrastructure with an on-premise data center, cloud data center, and multiple branch offices. All of these firewalls are managed via Check Point Multi Domain Management as well as Smart Event to see security events across our environment.

IPS is set primarily to prevent and only some signatures are set to detect (only after some false positives) so we still see them and get notifications via the Smart Event reports.

IPS is updated automatically and pushed to all gateways every two hours. 

Check Point's IPS simply works and is continuously kept up-to-date on all gateways. Via the management, it's possible to let the gateway update the IPS signatures itself, instead of letting the management update itself and then push the updates to the gateways.

If there's a new data center or branch office and everything is still in the test phase, it's possible to set the IPS policy to detect only so you can gather data and create a baseline without completely disabling IPS. That way, you can still see log entries.

Automatic updates can be done either via management or the Gateway itself, without any user interaction. The gateway is up-to-date with the newest signatures.

If you're unsure which profile to use, Check Point has some pre-defined profiles according to its best practices. Each one adds a different load to the relevant gateway, so you have to first check the current load and then decide on the right profile.

IPS signatures can be set quite granularly depending on your environment. You can filter on performance impact, severity, and confidence which makes sizing and adapting easier.

You can't turn off IPS completely as there are some signatures that are set even without activated IPS. If you know that, you can act accordingly. But sometimes you have to do a general exception instead of a granular one.

There are always some false positives with non-RFC traffic. This is good for security, however, it will cause some effort in day-to-day business as there will have to be exceptions for certain applications.

Threat Prevention policies are not very easily manageable as there are several profiles/policies/etc. Therefore, there are several ways to add exceptions and check the configuration.

I've used the solution for over ten years.

The solution is very stable.

The scalability is quite good, depending on which IPS profile you're using.

The solution is easy to set up.

Intrusion prevention and detection are the most valuable pillars in the security system, which detects and prevents exploits or weaknesses in vulnerable systems or in applications and protect against threats not only based on signatures but also based on anomalies, behavioral analysis, etc.

IPS is already integrated and comes as a security license in Check Point NG Firewalls and NGTX Firewalls.

Every defense system must have a feature set that provides complete security for Network IPS and Check Point has very powerful high throughput - almost at terabyte speed - with the help of a hyper-scale approach.

Organizations can scan for vulnerabilities know as VAPT, which many prefer as one-step closure for maximum security for the entire network. Check Point IPS plays a leading role in patching those vulnerabilities based on CVE IDS.

Based on updates received from the Check Point Threat Cloud, CVE IDs get updated or we can manually add those signatures.

It helps organizations to get a complete report for vulnerabilities in applications, the host running in the network (which helps to fixed to vulnerabilities based on CVE IDs), and gives reports for the compromised host, C&C host, DNS tunneling attempts, and protects against vulnerability in SNMTP HTTP POP, etc.

There's a good out-of-the-box configuration for recommended security based on severity levels, confidence levels, and network impact - also known as an IPS Profile.

For better security, we can edit options based on requirements and we can keep actions as detect-only which gives us alerts but allows traffic to flow without stopping anything.

There's an automatic update after every 2 hours which makes sure that the database is up to date and providing zero-day vulnerability protection.

Check Point IPS provides reports for running vulnerabilities which help enable SOC teams to respond to the highest-priority events first to patch them.

After the R80 release, there are almost all feature sets available under IPS Configuration. However, further to this, adding a direct vulnerability scan based on ports and protocol for every zone (LAN, DMZ, or Outside) will make Check Point very different compared to other vendors on the market.

Most customers take an IPS license but they don't take a SmartEvent license and when this happens, they will not be aware of the report parts such as current threats in the network open ports/protocol, vulnerabilities in a system, or detected/prevented attacks. For such cases, Check Point should provide a bundled license with IPS. 

I've been using the solution for more than four years.

The solution is highly stable for this particular blade.

Scalability can depend on throughput and if we use Maestro Hyperscale, we can distribute load across multiple Check Point Firewalls to get the maximum (in TPS) throughput.

Most of the time there is no need to take support for this,  but the CVE closure technical support team helps lot.

Customers may have had different NGFW solutions, however, after, they migrated over to Check Point NGFW.

The installation was straightforward in terms of configuration and onboarding.

We are service providers and provide services to customers.

Attacks are getting prevented and detected based on severity which helps our organization to get rid of compromising attacks.

Check Point IPS license is a must-have, and users need to make sure the database gets updated on daily basis after every 2 hours as per the defined configuration (which helps to get maximum protection).

The configuration is very simple and effective if you refer to the configuration guide properly.

We did not look at any other solution.

The solution is best in class.

We use this solution to secure the organization against any attack coming into the network via the internet, a third party, or any other connected network. It is used to detect and prevent identified threats at the perimeter level so attacks do not penetrate the network.

With so many access points present on a typical business network, it is essential that we have a way to monitor for signs of potential violations, incidents, and imminent threats.

We also use it to provide flexibility for the SOC admin to identify any suspicious activity and either detect and allow (IDS) or prevent (IPS) the threat. It logs and reports any such incident to the centralized logger so the required action can be taken by the SOC team.

This IPS device is protecting the organization's assets from any know vulnerability or threats that are coming from the network and vice versa.

It protects against specific known exploits but also, with SandBlast integration, it is able to protect against unknown or zero-day attacks at the perimeter level. An example of this is C&C communication, which is getting trigger by compromised systems.

It's able to detect and prevent any tunneling attempt that is happening via compromised systems, thereby avoiding data leakage.

It provides the capability to enable security policy based on templates, which can be enabled by the organization, depending upon their need. For example, enabling the highest security with the lowest performance impact is a matter of selecting templates accordingly.

IPS can be enabled on the same security gateway and does not require any additional hardware purchase or additional network connectivity.

It provides complete visibility and reporting on a single dashboard for the entire NG firewall, including the IPS blade on the Smart Console.

Signatures are constantly updated and it also provides virtual patching protection up to a certain extent. 

It provides a detect-only mode for IPS Security policy that the admin can enable on a required segment for monitoring, giving an opportunity to observe prior to blocking.

There is a performance impact on the NGFW post-enabling the IPS blade/Module, which can even lead to downtime if IPS starts to monitor or block high-volume traffic. 

There is no separate, dedicated appliance for IPS.

In the case of the IPS blade enabled on the NG firewall, it does not provide flexibility to monitor specific segments as easily as the IPS policies that are applied on the security gateway. There is lots of configuration and exclusion policy that need to be configured to bypass traffic from IPS Policy. 

IPS gets bypass in case performance goes above certain limit. This is the default setting that is provided.

I have been using Check Point IPS for more than six years.

This is a stable product.

Most of the organization is deployed on the NGFW and it has scaled accordingly, with most devices in HA mode.

Technical support is excellent.

We did not use another solution prior to this one.

This is a blade/module that needs to be enabled, selected, and applied across the security gateway.

Our in-house team was responsible for deployment.

Enabling IPS does not require any additional license purchase from OEM, as it comes by default with the NGFW bundle. This blade/module can be enabled based on the requirement and can be pushed to the security gateway.

We did not evaluate other options.

I work in MNC company and we have 6 GEO locations in India and all of our locations are using Check Point as a perimeter firewall. I sit in our HO Office and I am maintaining all the location firewalls with my team, except for 1 location. We regularly monitor the security alerts on our perimeter and based on that we will align our location IT to check and update us. IPS is our core blade for network security, it is provide the details that some suspicious activities happen on our network as per the IPS signature database, and based on that we will work on that.

As our primary use case with IPS blade we are daily receiving non-compliant IKE alert, and we know if we prevented it then what impact will happen, our all site to site tunnel will stop working which is running with noncompliant IKE and we are not forcing our client to update that noncompliant IKE protocol. 

We have configured the IPS daily report on our Check Point Gateway so we get daily reports with details of IPS related alerts. Based on the report we will check whether it is in prevention or detection mode and based on that we will check with the internal team and work on that. This is a very useful blade to prevent unwanted and unknown attacks. We can also create strict policies in the IPS blade to prevent high and critical severity but in our organization, we follow the same but in some cases, we have created exceptions.

Overall with the IPS blade we can say we are secure with unknown attacks. 

The default category (Low, Medium, High, Critical) is the most valuable feature because we don't know what type of attack will happen, but with this category, we can create a policy to prevent any high and critical severity behavior. With this, we can protect our organization from weakness exploit of vulnerable systems.

IPS can protect our organization with any old vulnerabilities or if any vulnerability was detected within a few minutes. IPS can protect us as per our configured policy.

I strongly agree that with IPS blade we can protect our organization vulnerabilities. I would like to have the ability to virtually patch our application or vulnerable machine that is talking ourside our network. If it is there then we can protect our application and systems to any unknown attack if our system or application has a weakness or vulnerability. 

I observed on our management that sometimes IPS does not connect to the threat cloud, we have to check and improve it. Otherwise, all of the features are good.  

I have been using Check Point IPS for the last four years. 

Sometimes it will not connect to the threat cloud.

This is a fully salable blade.

Overall okay.

Straightforward.

Vendor team

Priceless.

Reg. cost and licensing part out procurement team taking care.

The IPS is a very good blade in Check Point NGFW.

Our company works in developing and delivering online gambling platforms. The Check Point NGFWs are the core security solution we use to protect our DataCenter environment located in Asia (Taiwan). The environment has about ~50 physical servers as virtualization hosts, and we have two HA Clusters consist of 2x5400 hardware appliances, managed by an OpenServer Security Management Server on a Virtual Machine (KVM), all running on R80.10 with the latest JumboHotfix. 

The Clusters serve as the firewalls for both inter-VLAN and external traffic. We have the Intrusion Prevention System (IPS) blade activated on both Check Point HA Clusters as the counter-measure against advanced threats and malware. The IPS blade mostly used for ingress traffic from the Internet to the DMZ VLAN.

I think that the security of our DataCenter has been increased to a large extent by activating of the Check Point Intrusion Prevention System software blade. Before that, we used the Cisco ACLs and Zone-Based firewall configured on switches and routers, which currently not an efficient solution for protecting from advanced threats. Now we have state-of-the-art, true, and efficient Next-Generation firewall, and the IPS blade is the heart of it. The security profiles activated in the IPS blade check the traffic not just by TCP/UDP port of the connection, but by traffic patterns and the application behaviour. 

The number of IPS protections is amazing - after the latest update, I see more than 11000 in the SmartConsole.

All the protections are tagged and categorized by the vendor/type/product, the severity of the threat, confidence level, and performance impact of the activation, which helps in finding and enabling only he profiles that we really need (e.g. we don't have any Microsoft Windows servers in our environment, so decided to disable such protections by default).

The protections are updated based on the schedule - we used the default once-a-day approach.

I also like that the new protections may be automatically activated in the "Staging mode", which only detect the possible threat and alerts them, but doesn't block the actual traffic, thus minimizing the impact of the false positives. 

In my opinion, the Check Point software engineers should works on the performance of the blade - when it is activated with the big number of the protections in place, the monitoring shows us the significant increase in the CPU utilization for the gateway appliances - up to 30 percents, even so, we are cherry-picking only the profiles that we really needed.

Due to that fact it is also not so easy to choose the correct hardware appliance when you are planning the infrastructure. It is even more important when you realize that the Check Point hardware is very expensive.

We have been using this solution for three years, starting since late 2017.

The solution is reliable and stable, we didn't have any software or hardware issue while using it.

The Check Point software blade is activated on the HA Clusters in Active-Standby mode. There's a space to grow with the current setup, but eventually, we may switch to the Active-Active mode and add additional appliances to the clusters.

Even so we had a number of the support cases opened with the Check Point team, none of them was connected with the IPS blade. In general, there are professionals in the support team, but some cases took surprisingly long time to be resolved. 

Before the Check Point IPS, we relied on the simple stateful firewalls configured on Cisco switches and routers and moved to Check Point to get improved security against the modern threats.

The initial setup was easy, as was the configuration. Now the solution almost doesn't require the time for managing it.

The implementation was done by the Certified Check Point Expert we have in the in-house team - the Check Point solutions are popular, so there are such engineer available on the job market.

The overall cost of the solution is really high. You should properly scale the setup you are planning to purchase. 

The licensing model is simple, but some of the software blades are not included into the default bundles and should be purchased separately - pay attention to that.

We didn't evaluate the other solutions.

The correct performance sizing is essential for this kind of software - use the tools provided by the vendor, and consult the sales if you are still not sure.