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Update to Industry?s Top Cyber Security Platform Boosts Performance up to 50% With New HyperSpect™ Technology.

San Carlos, CA -- August 27, 2013 -- Check Point® Software Technologies Ltd.(Nasdaq: CHKP), the worldwide leader in securing the Internet, today announced the availability of Check Point R77, the latest release for its award-winning Software Blade Architecture. R77 offers over 50 product enhancements, including a new ThreatCloud Emulation Service, Check Point HyperSpect™ performance enhancing technology, Check Point Compliance Software Blade, new Central Device Management, improved user identity awareness with RADIUS and IF-MAP integration, and enhancements to Check Point's GAiA™ Unified Operating System.

Today's cyber criminals work at a dizzying pace, developing stealthy new attacks and carefully targeting their victims with customized malware. Researchers estimate that an average of 70,000 to 100,000 new malware samples are created and distributed every day.1 The sheer volume of malware demonstrates the ever-increasing barrage of advanced and previously undiscovered attacks that organizations face. At the same time, the business-critical requirements for network performance continue to grow at an exponential pace. This environment requires a combination of threat prevention capabilities, lightning-fast security infrastructure, and automated regulatory compliance capabilities. Check Point R77 brings together preventative security capabilities, compliance monitoring and real-life performance boosts to existing gateways.

“Our customers need to stay one step ahead of the bad guys to protect their networks, and R77 provides the best platform and security protections to help them to do that. With optimized performance, cloud-based threat emulation and automated compliance monitoring, our software blade architecture is designed from the ground up to be the most comprehensive multi-layered security solution available today,” said Dorit Dor, vice president of products at Check Point Software Technologies.

Highlighted features of the new R77 Software Blade Release include:

Check Point ThreatCloud Emulation Service

Check Point's ThreatCloud Emulation Service prevents infections from undiscovered (zero-day) exploits, new variants of malware, and targeted attacks and advanced persistent threats (APT). Part of Check Point's leading multi-layered Threat Prevention solution, ThreatCloud Emulation Service quickly inspects suspicious files, emulates how they run to discover malicious behavior, and instantly blocks newly identified malware in email attachments, file downloads, and direct web content. Attack information is then shared to Check Point's collaborative network and cloud-driven knowledge base, ThreatCloud, for automatic protection.

First announced in February 2013, Check Point ThreatCloud Emulation is now offered as a new cloud service, which is based on a global, organization-wide monthly quota of scanned files. This monthly quota is across all of the security gateways on an organization's network and is an elastic deployment, allowing for an increase in quota based on usage and growth. ThreatCloud Emulation is also available through the Private Cloud Emulation Appliance.

Check Point HyperSpect™

R77 is the first release to include Check Point HyperSpect™, an intelligent, adaptive content inspection engine that maximizes hardware utilization through a wide spectrum of optimizations and accelerations, including hyper threading technologies. Through HyperSpect™, organizations will experience significantly higher performance, including up to 50% real-world performance boost on all high-end platforms.

With the simple software upgrade to R77, organizations can safely consolidate security by utilizing Check Point’s multi-layered software blade protections on the same platform while experiencing sustained performance. HyperSpect™ increases compute power and optimizes inspection tailored to the most popular Internet traffic such as media streaming and http communication, which consume the greatest amount of Internet bandwidth.

Check Point Compliance Software Blade

Check Point’s Compliance Software Blade will be generally available through the R77 release. Introduced in March 2013, the Compliance Software Blade is the first next-generation-firewall-integrated and fully-automated compliance monitoring solution that leverages an extensive knowledge of regulatory requirements and over 300 Security Best Practices. The Check Point Compliance Software Blade reduces the complexity of external compliance requirements and internal security mandates by providing instant notification of policy changes, by continuously assessing security posture across all Check Point Software Blades and by offering actionable recommendations to improve compliance and security.

“The ability of the blade to solve our compliance concerns with regard to audits or security assessments is a huge benefit to our organization,” said William Dippel, manager, Networking, Data Security and Communications at Desert Research Institute. “Not only are we now more compliant with regulations, the blade has made us more secure by directing us to areas of concern for which we were not even aware of beforehand.”

Other Featured Product Enhancements

• New and Integrated Central Device Management: Organizations can efficiently manage and maintain multiple security gateways utilizing the new Central Device Management feature. New provisioning capabilities in SmartDashboard management console help to eliminate configuration errors in complex environments and reduce the operational cost of managing and maintaining security environments. These capabilities do not require an additional license for implementation.
• Check Point GAiA™: Enhancements to the Check Point GAiA™ Unified Secure Operating System brings faster upgrade and updates with decreased downtime by 90% as well as improved user experience on GAiA WebUI for security administrators.
• Identity Awareness Integration: Updates include improved user identity accuracy in non-windows environments by acquiring user identity from RADIUS and IF-MAP integration.
• Improved Licensing User Experience: R77 makes licensing transparent with automatic license retrieval and data synchronization between Check Point UserCenter and the security management console.

Pricing and Availability

The R77 Release is a free upgrade for existing customers.

The ThreatCloud Emulation Service is based on a global organizational quota, which begins at a monthly list price of $500 for up to 10,000 files inspected per month.

R77 and ThreatCloud Emulation Service will be available by September 2, 2013 from our worldwide partners.