Protecting the Oblivious

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Data Security

Protecting the Oblivious

4/1/2008

By Rama Ramaswami

That kind of balancing act is probably one of the greatest challenges to IT security in higher ed, says Joseph Clark, senior network engineer at the College of Charleston (SC), a public university with about 11,000 students. "You have to keep everyone satisfied and meet their needs, but still provide a secure environment. In contrast, corporations can take the totalitarian view. A corporate VP of security can change anything he wants, but here there are committees involved and everyone wants to be a part of it. You're dealing with a lot of politics, so you just have to keep an open mind."

Clark found an acceptable compromise in a network-based intrusion prevention system from NitroSecurity. He has installed the vendor's NitroGuard IPS program, which detects and blocks attacks, and NitroView ESM, an appliance that allows previously separate data to be correlated and analyzed together, identifying relationships between network activity, security alerts, and events originating from device logs (including server, host, and application logs). This not only ensures security but also provides the precise reporting necessary to comply with regulatory mandates such as the Payment Card Industry Data Security Standard and the Health Insurance Portability and Accountability Act (HIPAA). Users see no difference in their access levels or ability to transfer or receive data over the network.

The greatest threat to web security is the student. -James Beers, Moravian College

The solution, installed in February 2007, has greatly shortened the time it takes to detect and repair breaches. "Before, our security tools were all over the place," Clark says. "We couldn't consolidate everything into one. Now, when we have an attack, we have all the forensics in one place. It takes 30 minutes instead of one day to correlate the data."

Cloak-and-Dagger Tactics

It takes a lot, however, to foil a determined hacker. Campuses can't protect themselves on all fronts, especially as cyber thieves come up with ever more exotic attack methods. "Some of the things I'm seeing now I never would have thought of two years ago," says Clark. "For example, they're now using DNS [Domain Name System] to conduct peerto- peer attacks, and DNS is usually allowed undetected through a network. There are a lot of cloaking techniques that hackers use."

Moravian's Beers shares Clark's concern: "I really think social engineering will be the next big thing. People are going to be contacted via chat or e-mail. There will be more personalization, more reconnaissance done before an attack."

In the absence of a crystal ball, many institutions are focusing on specific aspects of security, notably e-mail protection. CDW-G's Zindell believes that e-mail threats are on the rise, particularly on college campuses, which rely heavily on e-mail for communication. "Fraudulent e-mails are so perfectly made that the most sophisticated people are fooled by them," he says. "Dedicated e-mail security appliances are the best solution. There are a lot of companies that offer e-mail solutions as their only product."