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By Pia Heikkila, 4 April 2002 13:05

NEWS Check Point has slammed its rival vendor Cisco claiming the company does not understand security and keeps on failing its customers with faulty products. Cisco, the world's largest firewall maker, was accused of being ignorant of security technologies by Check Point who said it should stick to networking products and leave the security to the experts. Marius Nacht, senior vice president at Check Point, said Cisco has a lot to learn about security. "Cisco keeps on re-inventing their security strategy every few years because they keep on failing to get it right," he said. "They should leave it to those who know. "Cisco does not co-operate in the security industry either which could be one of the reasons for their products' shortcomings." He also claimed Cisco's customers no longer trust the company as it released a major piece of security software a few weeks ago with massive faults in it. "To release the faulty product was obviously a mistake, but it just made me think they don't really understand security very well. We get a lot of customers from Cisco simply because their customers don't trust Cisco to do their job properly." The news comes just a day after Cisco warned of a vulnerability in one of its telephony products, which could enable hackers to launch denial of service attacks. The company said it has fixed the hole. Cisco was unavailable for comment.