A test by NSS Labs that found firewalls from five vendors are subject in one way or another to remote exploit by hackers has ignited furious response from vendors Fortinet and SonicWall.

Security vendor Fortinet has hit back against tests by NSS Labs that showed one of its high-end firewalls along with products from other vendors could be hacked using a 'TCP split handshake attack'.

Apparently, NSS Labs struck a nerve. NSS Labs revealed that almost all of the firewalls it tested for a recent report are susceptible to crash or compromise using common attacks. The firewall vendors in question, though, beg to differ and take exception to the claims made by NSS Labs.

Fortinet today introduced a high-speed security blade that combines a slew of capabilities -- including firewall, VPN, intrusion prevention, identity-based application controls, anti-virus, anti-spam and Web filtering -- and delivers up to 40G bit/sec throughput.

Microsoft said its free malware cleaning tool had scrubbed the money-stealing Zeus bot from nearly 275,000 Windows computers in under a week.