UVA-Wise Taps Mirage for Network Security
The University of Virginia's College at Wise (UVA-Wise) will implement network security technology from Mirage Networks (Austin, TX) to protect network communications at its residence halls.
“We focused on monitoring our network to catch threats before they could shut us down,” said UVa-Wise network security specialist Grant Baker, in a prepared statement. To that end, the school has selected Mirage Networks' Endpoint Control to monitor network traffic and enforce security policies.
The University of Virginia's only branch campus, UVa-Wise is a four-year residential college teaching approximately 1,900 students. All of its residence halls are wired to the campus network.
Endpoint Control uses a dynamic rule set to analyze each packet sent on the UVa-Wise network, and the school can customize those rules to match its security policies. If the system sniffs packets that are threatening or part of aberrant network behavior, it isolates the originating device to either completely cut it off, restrict its access on based on the device, user or infraction.
The system is designed to operate in rapidly shifting network environments, where the number of IP network devices is constantly changing. Some key features include:
Agentless network access control, which immediately identifies new devices attempting to access the network and runs a policy check to ensure the endpoint is not infected and meets all policies.
Protection from zero-day threats -- brand new threats for which a signature or patch is not yet available -- that based behavioral profiles used to continually monitor traffic and endpoints while they are connected to the network for behavior that indicates an infection or attack thus catching the originating source and tracking any propagation of a threat through the network.
Dynamic policy enforcement that lets administrations set different policies for different network segments to provide additional endpoint control.
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David Kopf is a freelance technology writer and marketing consultant, and can be reached at [email protected].