Reviews

Netgear ProSecure UTM9S review

Netgear's new UTM9S has plenty of network security features for SMBs and some interesting expansion options too. In this review, Dave Mitchell finds out if it's the most versatile ProSecure appliance yet.

3 Jan 2012

Once powered back up, it checked the NVX and restored all graphs and tables to their current state. ProSecure UTM appliances can't quarantine mail and malware locally, but this new feature solves this problem neatly by offloading this task onto the NAS appliance.

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The UTM9S can be upgraded using the optional wireless and VDSL/ADSL2+ modules.

The wireless module costs just 33 which is good value. It 802.11n in either the 2.4GHz or 5GHz bands. It doesn't support multiple SSIDs, but you can create a single profile with your chosen security and encryption settings, including MAC address filters.

The VDSL/ADSL2+ module is configured from the same tab in the web interface as the two Gigabit Ethernet WAN ports. Setup is simple as an auto-detect function sorts out most of the settings and you can use it as your primary WAN interface or link it with the Gigabit Ethernet ports for auto-rollover or load balancing.

Sophos' virus scanning can be applied to SMTP, POP3 and IMAP accounts and all updates are automated with checks as often as every fifteen minutes. HTTP, FTP and HTTPS traffic are also scanned and adding the latter as a standard feature makes the UTM9S even better value.

Anti-spam options include black and white lists and RBLs plus Mailshell's distributed spam analysis which has five sensitivity levels. For anti-spam testing, we left the appliance on its default setting filtering live mail for two weeks.

We configured the appliance to tag the subject line of suspect messages, but pass them through to our Outlook clients. Using rules to move tagged messages to separate folders we saw a decent spam detection rate of 97.2 percent with no false positives.