Last December, we installed TippingPoint Technologies Inc.'s UnityOne Intrusion Prevention Appliance, a high-speed device that blocks malicious traffic at gigabit speeds and incorporates peer-to-peer piracy-prevention capabilities. As soon as the device was installed, our staff could immediately see attacks being blocked on the security-management console's attack log. The university now prevents more than a million network threats every month, including worms and viruses, using this technology. With new security filters, we can keep the intrusion-prevention capabilities up-to-date, protecting the network from exploits on the most-recent vulnerabilities. These security filters protected us from the recent Blaster worm--also known as Sobig or LovSan--and its variants.
We also took an automated approach to the drag on network traffic caused by peer-to-peer file sharing. We had the option to block P2P traffic completely or let students retrieve shared files from outside the university network while blocking outsiders from retrieving shared files located within our systems. We chose the latter course. But the point is that we had the tools to manage P2P traffic according to our own policies. We now augment our bandwidth availability by blocking more than 1 million illegitimate, nonuniversity file shares per month. Our peak rate of bandwidth consumption used to be roughly 30 Mbps. But when we blocked one-directional peer-to-peer traffic and installed bandwidth management, the rate fell to 17 Mbps within the first 30 minutes, giving us a 43% increase in bandwidth availability.
This solution has protected our critical systems and core data paths to the Internet through three massive nationwide attacks. Our next steps will be to deploy smaller devices to protect specialty subnets attached to the university network, and to continue to develop forensic capabilities and management features that will protect and benefit our educational environments.
To realize the benefits of cloud-native software, an application must actually be cloud-native—designed to run in the cloud, interacting with disaggregated cloud services, fully manageable as code—to deliver the expected benefits.
By combining resources and expertise, the AI-Enabled ICT Workforce Consortium will offer a blueprint for how industries can adapt to an AI-dominated future.
IT leaders should heed the guidance of cybersecurity insurance providers who think businesses should prioritize security education, incident preparedness, regular internal audits, and ongoing vulnerability scanning and patching.
