8 Tips and Technologies That Can Keep a College Network Safe

Egen says a colleges’ first line of defense for their network is an outside firm.

He says outside firms can assess a network’s vulnerabilities and recommend the next steps to take to protect the network.

He also says an outside firm can be especially handy if inside perspectives deem everything is “safe and secure” when there are hidden risks.

“It is important is to have some objectivity,” Egen says. “If you talk to your internal folks, they may still tell you that everything is secure…It’s good to have somebody from the outside to cut through the bureaucracy and politics and tell you where your weaknesses are. From there, based on budget, timing and risk, the things you’re afraid of, you should be able to get that laundry list of things you want to buy or changes you need to make.”

Egen says firewalls are a useful technology to equip a college’s network with.

He says firewall solutions are often free, and can prevent and mitigate things like sequel injection attacks and denial of service.

He also says firewalls can sometimes be powerful enough to protect networks against more sophisticated attacks.

Egen says he used to use dotDefender as a firewall solution for his network.

Egen says DLPEs can increase the strength of a network’s protection.

However, he says colleges should be careful with DLPEs because they can often be intrusive and make day to day tasks more challenging for end users.

Egen also says colleges that invest in DLPEs should implement them in higher risk departments on campus.

“There are a lot of false positives, so make sure you only use DLPEs in your high-risk areas,” he says. “Things like the bursar’s office, or wherever they’re handling transactions or credit card numbers, for instance.”

Egen says switches are good protection tools that handle denial of service attacks.

He says switches are a good solution for denial of service attacks because service attacks look like regular traffic on a college’s website.

Switches will work cohesively with firewall and network intrusion solutions to keep network defenses high, and redirect that traffic so the website functionality stays up to speed.

“Denial of service attacks can be very hard to defend against because it looks like normal traffic to your website, but, there are a certain amount of requests from an IP range in a certain amount of time, and you want to take that traffic and route it somewhere else so it doesn’t slow down your website,” Egen says. “There are a lot of switches out there, particularly by Cisco, that can handle that really well.”

Pictured is a member of the Cisco Catalyst 3560 Series Switches.

Egen says colleges should have their network data encrypted to keep it protected.

Encryption will ensure that only the right eyes see a college’s data, and keep the wrong ones locked out.

Egen says there are plenty of encryption solutions out there to keep data secured.

He also says colleges’ IT departments can even partner with a development team to determine the best way to execute encryption.

“You can do some mitigation to make sure all of your data is encrypted, and there are a lot of really nice encryption software out there,” Egen says. “There’s SequelServer, TDE (transparent data encryption), which allows you to seamlessly encrypt everything in your database, from student information or social security numbers. That’s something your network team can work on with your development team to launch.”

Egen says colleges can best defend their networks by thinking like a hacker.

He says when colleges break out of defense mode and channel their thinking towards potential threats, they can increase their likelihood of decreasing actual network attacks.

Egen also says if colleges’ internal departments struggle with this mindset, they can bring in a firm who can take over from there.

“I think it’s important to bring in a firm or people who can think like hackers,” he says. “They can get into the mindset of the people who are trying to attack you. It’s a different sort of mentality versus just the defensive mentality, which is just to prevent. I think that can help you flush out some of the risks, especially on the web application side.”