Blocking Cyber Attacks, Increase Bandwidth
- By Thomas Danford
- 10/31/03
Founded in 1850, the University of Dayton is the largest, private university
in Ohio and one of the top 10 largest Catholic universities in the United States.
The university has over 70 academic programs for its 10,000 students, and is
one of the most wired campuses in the country. All university housing is connected
for high-speed Internet access, and all students are required to own computers.
The Problem
Like most universities, University of Dayton needed to provide open network
access to students, faculty and staff. This type of exposure makes it almost
impossible to stop attacks, such as Code Red and Nimda that bypass the firewall
on port 80 and other well-known ports. In the early stages of the Code Red worm
spreading, it was discovered that as few as five infected machines could overwhelm
the core campus router. This was further complicated in that there was no way
to determine if the network was under attack. The only valid strategy of blocking
attacks was to apply patches before a server or workstation—allowed on
the network.
Additionally, file sharing is prevalent with students using Peer-to-Peer applications
to download copyrighted music and video files. This can cause legal and security
risks as well as absorb significant bandwidth. University of Dayton estimates
that they received a dozen letters per month threatening legal action for piracy.
The Implementation
The University of Dayton installed TippingPoint Technologies’ UnityOne
Intrusion Prevention Appliance, a high-speed intrusion prevention system that
blocks malicious traffic and illegal P-to-P files on the network. We immediately
viewed attacks being blocked on the security management console’s attack
log. Since the implementation in early 2003, the university estimates that more
than one million worms, viruses, and attacks have been blocked each month. The
Digital Vaccine service, which allows administrators to download new security
filters to the system to protect against the latest vulnerabilities, buys administrators
additional time to patch their systems.
University of Dayton’s Network Systems and Security Officer Ronnie Wagers
said, “The UnityOne gives me peace of mind. I am no longer comfortable
with the idea of running our perimeter defense without it.”
The intrusion prevention enables customers to block P-to-P traffic uni-directionally
or bi-directionally. The University of Dayton chose to allow students to be
able to retrieve shared files from outside the university network, but blocked
people outside the university network from retrieving shared files located within
the university. With the implementation, reports show over 1 million shared
files are blocked per month, augmenting the organization’s bandwidth availability.
Results from the University of Dayton show that after blocking P-to-P traffic
uni-directionally, bandwidth consumption dropped from a peak of 30Mbps to a
low of 17Mbps within the first 30 minutes, giving a 43 percent increase in bandwidth
availability.
Value Proposition
Organizations can greatly increase their security and bandwidth availability
while reducing the legal risk of piracy by blocking P-to-P file sharing applications.
TippingPoint’s Peer-to-Peer Piracy Prevention feature is included in all
UnityOne Intrusion Prevention Appliances and Systems. The system performs deep
packet inspection through Layer 7, providing immediate protection against known
threats and vulnerabilities.
The cost savings from avoiding an attack could easily reach well into the
six-figure range. When calculating return on investment from an intrusion prevention
solution; administrators should take into account the time required to patch
a system and reboot, the time required for emergency patching (the same day
as a vulnerability or exploit is published), remediation time, time to test
to make sure the machine is fixed, the opportunity cost of what tasks are neglected
due to remediation, decreased productivity, overtime charges or outsourced staff
expenditures required to fix the infection, and damages caused from the actual
attack.
All of these factors would be multiplied by the number of infected machines,
which can range into the hundreds or thousands depending on the size of the
organization. Our intrusion prevention system has proved to be a good investment.