Athena Security and SecurePassage announce strategic partnership to deliver integrated change and policy management system

Partnership creates new capabilities to enable instant network security assessments

October 29, 2007 — Lisle IL — Athena Security, creators of AthenaVerify, and SecurePassage, makers of FireMon, have partnered to deliver intelligent infrastructure software. The integrated offering will amplify FireMon's robust change management capabilities to include the impact on enterprise network policies. As device configuration changes are made in FireMon, AthenaVerify will automatically re-calculate all access paths to critical assets, ensuring business operations will not be affected.

"Working with Firemon and AthenaVerify, a security assessment can be performed every time a change is introduced in the network. This enables continuous monitoring of the change process and a dramatic reduction in the manual efforts required to evaluate network security. It goes beyond the snapshot view available at a point in time through infrequent and lengthy security assessments, and proactively identifies issues before a change is implemented, said Adarsh Arora, CEO Athena Security.

"AthenaVerify will allow our FireMon customers to improve enterprise security posture. Organizations with good security have a straightforward path to successful regulatory compliance. We believe this system will significantly shorten the path to compliance while focusing operational groups on sound networking design principles," said Gary Fish, CEO Fishnet Security, the largest distributor of FireMon.

As a result of the partnership agreement, SecurePassage will market the combined system to its new and existing customers. Secure Passage's customers include some of the world's leading financial firms, telecommunication companies, government institutions, technology firms and oil providers in countries throughout the world.

Jody Brazil, CTO, SecurePassage says, "The integration of FireMon and Athena has addressed a technologically complex customer need. Athena extends FireMon's capabilities, providing customers with in-depth and comprehensive network security analysis never before possible. Our solution provides a deep and granular analysis of network devices, and now AthenaVerify will cast our intelligence in the context of the entire network. This integrated solution displays the interdependencies of network devices and the policy access paths for all possible connections. This is a powerful feature that matches perfectly with our own strength, which is to provide compelling solutions to network managers who want practical, non-intrusive approaches to managing operational risk."

About Athena Security

Athena Security measures network security risk. The flagship product, AthenaVerify, uses deep mathematical techniques to identify exposures imbedded in the architecture of the network. Customers use it to pinpoint areas where corrective actions should be applied for meeting business and compliance objectives. With AthenaVerify, organizations can proactively and continuously predict the impact of change on security posture and ensure high availability of critical IT assets. The product handles networks with thousands of security devices in cross-platform multiple vendor environments. For more information see www.athenasecurity.net or email sales@athenasecurity.net.

About Secure Passage

Secure Passage is an industry-leading independent software vendor focused on developing security applications. Headquartered in Kansas City, MO, Secure Passage provides innovative security solutions to some of the largest IT organizations in the world. Its flagship product, FireMon, is a Firewall Operations Management solution that monitors network device configurations for change and analyzes the effect of change on device operation. FireMon detects changes to configurations, assesses the impact of those changes on expected device behavior, alerts administrators with that impact analysis, and optimizes security policies for greater effectiveness. FireMon was built on the belief that network professionals can manage any change — if they know what the change means in the context of their network. FireMon meets this need by giving security professionals, particularly security administrators, auditors and security managers, visibility into their networks and the tools to control change.