Introducing Playbook 3.0

Let me tell you how good at marketing we are. We are so good at marketing that we are releasing a product right in time for the Christmas holidays —- in fact, just 7 days before Christmas break! As students of IT products know, the week before Christmas is an ideal time to capture the attention of enterprise buyers.

And on that note, allow me to introduce Playbook 3.0!

What’s Playbook?

New to Playbook? Here’s the elevator pitch: Playbook is the last product you’d think a vulnerability research team would build. It doesn’t decompile MIPS C code. It can’t spot vulnerabilities in VOIP implementations. It doesn’t harden the Flash runtime. It barely contains any compiler code at all! Instead, it takes the working lives of people who have to deal with firewall rules and tries to make them better.

If you write code, you’re familiar with things like Trac and Github. You check your code into version control, you browse and review it in a web interface, you document it in a wiki, and you file tickets for bugs. Every dev team uses something like it.

Playbook takes the same workflow and bends it to firewall management.

Playbook is a web interface to versioned-controlled firewall configurations, which it can slurp up straight out of running firewalls. It parses and understands firewall rules, detects errors, and (most importantly) indexes rule terms so you can find addresses and networks across large numbers of firewalls. It handles end-user requests for rule changes so you don’t have to pick up the phone to talk to the Sharepoint admin. It provides for peer review and approval. And when rules are staged and ready, it offers push-button deployment so you don’t have log in to 100 remote devices.

What’s New?

Playbook 3.0 does these things better: it has a better UI, it’s faster, the rule editor gracefully handles huge rulesets without dumping you into a big text edit window, and (here’s a big feature we’ll talk about later) it now handles host rules for OS X desktops and laptops.

We’re beta testing 3.0 right now. Interested? Our first three qualified beta testers (you qualify if you have production firewalls) get a permanent free starter license. Sign up here. Questions? Start here with the FAQ.

We’ve been quiet on the blog lately, and here’s one of the reasons. Craig will have more to say about Playbook 3.0 shortly, and then we’ll have another major announcement about products early in January. Stay tuned!