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Data Security
Protecting the Oblivious
4/1/2008
SpamTitan, an open source, easy-to-use system that offers what he calls "enterprise-class features at a very affordable price." The minimal investment required gained him a quick signoff on the purchase from university officials. With installation time taking less than one hour for 500 licenses, and a 90 percent increase in spam filtration in the few months that the system has been in use, SpamTitan provided "results from day one," says Mansfield.Jackie Robinson, IT manager at Georgia Southern, is also a fan of simple, costeffective e-mail solutions. Two years ago, Robinson was battling a blitz of e-mailborne denial-of-service (DoS) attacks, directory harvest attacks, and zombie computers launching outbound campaigns. At one point, she says, the college's e-mail servers were shutting down at about 1 pm daily, causing delays and forcing her to spend several hours a day writing code to combat new attacks.
Robinson turned to Message Assurance Gateway, an e-mail security system from Red Condor. "We looked at about half a dozen big names," she says. "But their applications were too complicated. We had to go through screen after screen, when all we wanted to do was plug it in and keep out spam-not take a weeklong course on how to run the application." In addition to its ease of use, the Red Condor system is highly cost-effective, blocks or quarantines 92 percent of spam, and has resulted in a major savings in staff time, according to Robinson.
Ultimately-and even with the availability of new and better solutions- education is the best defense, as Embry-Riddle's Bixler puts it. Information security, she concedes, is a "cat-and-mouse game. We create better tools, but hackers create better ways to hack. Better education and awareness are our best tools. Our students are very trusting of technology-they grew up with it. We owe them the knowledge so they can keep themselves safe. This challenge is not unique to universities. In every setting, the uneducated employee is the worst threat."
::WEBEXTRAS ::
On-Demand Webinar: Making the Grade With Role-Based Network Access: Leveraging User Directories and 802.1X.
Peace (of Mind) in Our Time: These five key security trends are reshaping how universities defend their databases.
Rama Ramaswami is senior editor at The Economist Group, publisher of The Economist, Financial Times, and other international publications. She is based in New York City.
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