OTW Recommended Products: VMWare, Kasperky and Palo Alto Networks

Many of my readers ask me for recommendations on products that I use. Beginning with this post I will list products that I endorse. In ALL cases, these will be be products that I actually use and endorse, not simply advertisements for anything, like you will find in nearly every other website. If don't use the product and like it, you won't find it here. Period.

To begin, I am only endorsing three products; VMWare , Kaspersky Labs and Palo Alto Networks. I have used competing products in all of these product lines and I always return to these three.

Kaspersky Labs

Kaspersky Labs, founded and run by Eugene Kaspersky, has consistently scored among the top performers on detecting malware on objective and independent tests labs such as AV-Test GmBH. In addition, Kaspersky Labs is usually the first to detect and mitigate new zero-day malware found in the wild. That's why I have been using Kaspersky Labs products for years on my own systems, despite being offered free anti-malware software from other vendors.

To find out more or to order this state of the art anti-malware software, click on the icon below.

VMWare

In my lab, I use numerous physical computers and virtual machines to test exploits and malware. In addition, I use virtual machines to analyze malware by reverse engineering and exploit development. Over the years, I have used products from Oracle, Microsoft, Citrix and others, but I have found the products from VMWare to work consistently and nearly flawlessly. VMWare makes a number of products for nearly every platform and operating system. If you want the best virtualization software, I can recommend VMWare products without reservation.

Palo Alto Networks

Palo Alto Networks is employing next-generation firewalls that are true application level firewalls. Palo Alto Networks has tightly integrated application, user and content enabling/blocking and does this with throughput speeds up 20gbs! That in itself is truly amazing as most deep packet inspection firewalls can cause severe latency issues on the network.

I find Palo Alto networks to be consistently the most difficult to penetrate without detection (sorry Cisco, Juniper and Barracuda. I walk right past your supposedly next generation firewalls) Palo Alto Networks next-generation firewalls are the ONLY firewalls I recommend and install on client networks.

For now, these are the only three products on my recommended list. There may be more in the future, so keep checking back here.