Product guide

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Introducing Network Security Sensors
This section describes the McAfee
®
Network Security Sensors at a high-level and also describes the
McAfee
®
M-1250/M-1450 Network Security Sensor (Sensor) in detail.
Sensors are high-performance, scalable, and flexible content processing appliances built for the
accurate detection and prevention of intrusions, misuse, distributed denial of service (DDoS) attacks,
and network access control(NAC) of hosts. When deployed at key access points, a Sensor provides
real-time traffic monitoring to detect malicious activity, and respond to the malicious activity as
configured by the administrator.
After the Sensor is deployed and communication established, Sensors are configured and managed
using the McAfee Network Security Manager (Manager) server.
The process of configuring a Sensor and establishing communication with the Manager is described in
the later chapters of this guide. The Manager server is described in detail in the McAfee Network
Security Platform Manager Administration Guide.
Contents
About the M-1250/M-1450 Sensor
Physical description of the M-1250/M-1450 Sensor
About the M-1250/M-1450 Sensor
The M-1250 or the M-1450 Sensor provides effective network IPS functionality as well as Network
Access Control (NAC) of hosts.
The IPS functionality involves real-time detection and prevention of threats and known, zero-day, or
encrypted attacks. The Sensor can perform many types of attack responses, including generating
alerts and packet logs, resetting TCP connections, "scrubbing" malicious packets, and even blocking
attack packets entirely before they reach the intended target.
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McAfee
®
Network Security Platform M-1250/M-1450 Sensor Product Guide
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