At RSA Conference 2013 in San Francisco, Fortinet announced that the company’s FortiGuard Labs has launched new cloud-based sandboxing and IP reputation services that are designed to help protect against advanced persistent threats.

The FortiGuard cloud-based sandboxing service uses behavioral attributes to detect malware by executing them within a virtual environment. This serves as an additional protection layer that complements the FortiGate’s existing antivirus engine and its inline lightweight sandbox.

Suspicious files can be submitted automatically to the new hosted service for further scanning without significantly impacting a FortiGate’s performance. In addition, FortiCloud has added a new feature that serves as the online sandboxing portal, which provides detailed status and visibility into the scanned results.

FortiGuard Labs continually investigates and monitors IP’s that are compromised or behaving abnormally. The FortiGuard IP Reputation Service uses a number of different techniques, including historical analysis, honeypots and botnet analysis to provide immediate protection against wide scale automated attacks. The service also continuously learns from a global footprint of threat sensors, tracking malicious events to IP addresses in real time.

The new FortiGuard Labs services provide additional protection capabilities for the company’s FortiGate, FortiCloud, FortiWeb, FortiDDoS and FortiDNS network and application security platforms.