Games Distributor Level Up! Protects Multi-Country Network With Fortinet Solutions

SUNNYVALE, Calif., August 23, 2004 - Fortinet - the only provider of ASIC-powered, network-based antivirus firewall systems for real-time network protection - today announced that Level Up!, the first online games distributor in the Philippines, has chosen Fortinet's FortiGate™ platforms to protect its million-subscriber gaming network infrastructure. Level Up! hosts and distributes two game titles: the very popular Ragnarok and Oz World, both Massively Multiplayer Online Role-Playing Games (MMORPG) that allow players to interact with one another in virtual worlds as they would in the real world.

In the interactive game environment, real-time performance and 24x7 availability is key. Level Up! needed a security solution that had comprehensive security features and could also handle the high traffic generated by tens of thousands of players simultaneously accessing its servers in the Philippines, India and Brazil without degrading performance of its real-time interactive games. After researching online games security practices and conducting an extensive review of various hardware and software security products, Level Up! selected and has successfully deployed Fortinet's gigabit-speed, FortiGate-3000 antivirus firewall systems to secure its multi-country gaming network infrastructure and FortiGate-500 systems to protect its corporate offices in the Philippines.

Explained Albert Pangilinan-de la Cruz, Chief Technology Officer (CTO) of Level-Up! Games, Inc.: "Our previous firewall could only protect one of our several gaming worlds, because that was all the traffic it could handle. We used to get close to 100% CPU utilization on each firewall, and when it crashed, we lost revenue. Fortinet's FortiGate-3000 system's capabilities far surpass this -- handling traffic for three gaming worlds with lots of capacity to spare and providing headroom for significant future growth."

Mr. de la Cruz was also impressed with the ease of installation and configuration of the FortiGate systems, which were deployed by Fortinet value-added reseller partner, Network Solutions and Interfaces (NSI), in just two hours.

Like all FortiGate Antivirus Firewalls, the FortiGate-3000 and FortiGate-500 systems detect and eliminate the most damaging, content-based threats from email and Web traffic such as viruses, worms, intrusions, inappropriate Web content and more in real time - without degrading network performance. In addition to providing application- level protection, the FortiGate systems deliver a full range of network-level services - including firewall, VPN, intrusion detection, intrusion prevention, content filtering, traffic shaping and anti-spam - to provide complete network protection services in dedicated, easily managed platforms.

"Security performance and availability are important concerns for all companies, but for online gaming companies, it could mean the difference between success and failure," said Richard Kagan, Fortinet's vice president of marketing. "Fortinet's growing popularity with gaming companies like Level Up! demonstrates that our products can handle even the most demanding environments."

About Level Up! (http://www.level-up-games.com.ph/)
Level Up! is the first online games publisher in the Philippines. The company hosts and distributes Oz World by Ozmedia and Ragnarok by Gravity Corp., both Massively Multiplayer Online Games (MMOGs). MMOGs are games that bring together tens to thousands of players in virtual world at the same time. The company boasts a database of over a million users with at least 30,000 users online at any one time. Level Up! is looking to expand its game titles in the coming months, bringing bigger and better games to the Philippines market.

About Fortinet (www.fortinet.com)
Fortinet's award-winning FortiGate™ series of ASIC-accelerated antivirus firewalls, winner of the 2004 Security Product of the Year Award from Network Computing Magazine and the 2003 Networking Industry Awards Firewall Product of the Year, are the new generation of real-time network protection systems. They detect and eliminate the most damaging, content-based threats from e-mail and Web traffic such as viruses, worms, intrusions, inappropriate Web content and more in real time – without degrading network performance. FortiGate systems are the only security products that are quadruple-certified by the ICSA (antivirus, firewall, IPSec, NIDS), and deliver a full range of network-level and application-level services in integrated, easily managed platforms. Named to the Red Herring Top 100 Private Companies, Fortinet is privately held and based in Sunnyvale, California.