School board locks down Internet access

For Pamela Haney, monitoring Internet traffic is about more than bandwidth consumption.

The assistant technology director for Worth County Schools in Sylvester, Ga., says she needs to watch traffic more for security reasons. To start, being in charge of a network that gives access to children, she says she primarily needs to track Internet sites and determine which devices on the school's network of five schools and about 4,100 students accessed the sites. Other issues are that Internet sites can plant spyware on desktops and that e-mail opened by students could kick off viruses.

"We have students that will find a back-door way to access restricted sites," Haney says. "And we were having a lot of problems with viruses populating."

On a tip from a consultant working with the school, Haney decided to pilot an NP-500 network application management appliance from Network Physics to get a read on where kids were traveling on the ‘Net. The consultant helped her get the appliance up and running, and configured it to her specifications.

"I wanted a way to see where our traffic was going and to track back from where it came," she explains.

A month into the pilot, Haney says the NP-500 gives her the information she needs to find the unauthorized Web sites students visited as well as the means to better lock down the school network from virus infection.

"I can track the site back to the IP address of the devices on our network, we can talk to the kids, and we can add the site to our restricted list," she says. "The students are starting to get the idea that Big Brother is watching, that what they do on the PCs is not going unnoticed, which is what we were hoping for."

Haney has also used the NP-500 to detect two variants of the Sasser worm on the school networks. The NP-500 monitors network flows through a passive Gigabit Ethernet connection to a spanning port or tap. At this time, Haney says her team is unable to monitor e-mail with the appliance because the e-mail server is hosted elsewhere and not connected to the school's network. But she says that is her next plan for expanding the use of the product.