Attention to security keeps users - eels, sharks and whales - off the rocks.
So you think those guys over in accounting are as slippery as eels, but have you ever considered what your job would be like if the creatures you’re supporting actually did live in the sea? Not that a green moray would clamor for Gigabit Ethernet to the desktop or wireless LAN access, mind you. But what if network availability could affect the well-being of that eel, or a whale pod or a school of snappers? That’s life on the job for Marc Talavera, assistant IT director at Chicago’s world-renowned Shedd Aquarium.
So you think those guys over in accounting are as slippery as eels, but have you ever considered what your job would be like if the creatures you’re supporting actually did live in the sea? Not that a green moray would clamor for Gigabit Ethernet to the desktop or wireless LAN access, mind you. But what if network availability could affect the well-being of that eel, or a whale pod or a school of snappers?
That’s life on the job for Marc Talavera, assistant IT director at Chicago’s world-renowned Shedd Aquarium. Talavera has his fair share of humans to support, but really, he says, “it’s all about the animals.”
No doubt a beluga would weigh heavy on one’s mind; six even more so. That’s how many belugas live in the Shedd’s Oceanarium, a re-creation of the Pacific Northwest coast home to dolphins, sea otters, seals and other creatures native to that environment. With 3 million gallons of salt water, the Oceanarium is the world’s largest indoor marine mammal pavilion and a draw for tourists the world over.
Tourists also flock to the Shedd’s newest exhibit – the 10-room, 31-habitat Wild Reef – for a diver’s-eye view of a Philippine coral reef. There the big attraction is the sharks – nearly 30 zebras, blacktip and whitetip reefs, Japanese wobbegongs and sandbars slicing through looming coral reefs and schools of brightly colored fish in search of prey.
Unfortunately, the fish aren’t the Shedd’s only attraction and the sharks the most worrisome predators. As a nonprofit, the Shedd is like fresh bait to hackers, Talavera says.
“Generally speaking, because not-for-profits usually don’t have a whole lot of money to secure their environments, what winds up happening is they become easy targets,” he says. “So you get people trying to use exploits on such organizations because they don’t think they’ll have a secured environment or one with multiple layers of security.”
Indeed, they often don’t. When Talavera came to the Shedd three and a half years ago (along with the current IT director), security stood out as a major issue. “We had a lot of problems with Internet attacks and hack attempts on our systems,” says Talavera, adding that he has no way of knowing how many attempts were successful but that he did find one unauthorized FTP server in use. “The computing environment had been neglected. It was like a circus, or a zoo, at the time.”
That made securing the internal environment one of the first action items on the new IT team’s agenda, Talavera says. The concern was more about the nuisance of the hack attempts than the threat of hackers gaining deep, dark secrets about the Shedd inhabitants. “I don’t necessarily believe that anybody was trying to gain access to our secured files and get information on the animals. I think these were more experimentations to see if they could find a way in,” he explains.
Hackers haven’t found any leaks lately. Almost immediately upon joining the Shedd, Talavera began protecting the aquarium against these land sharks by building a layered security defense. NetScreen Technologies firewalls (now from Juniper) protect the perimeter, while eTrust anti-virus software from Computer Associates runs on user workstations. At the center sits the eSafe content security tool from Aladdin Knowledge Systems. A multifunction, gateway-based product, eSafe protects against viruses, prevents exploits of known security holes in HTML and other programs, and blocks spam. Since loading up eSafe three years ago, “any vandal file that has been attached to an e-mail has been stopped,” he says.
And eSafe doesn’t just protect the fish, it also helps preserve the upstanding reputation of this venerable, 75-year-old institution, Talavera adds. With eSafe, the Shedd can make sure that its large contingent of volunteer staffers, most of whom share access to a pool of 350 or so workstations, aren’t surfing to unsavory sites. “Based on our rules and URL filtering, we can see if people are trying to access sites that we as an organization don’t want people going to. This lets you really easily quantify what is passing from your internal network to the external network,” he says.
Talavera also has tested the eSafe Application Filter, which blocks unauthorized application traffic, such as MP3 files, instant messages and spyware, but the aquarium hasn’t committed to deploying that yet.
Knowing that predators aren’t going to take down the Shedd’s servers – be they those used for the interactive presentations within the habitats or as part of the animal life-support system – makes for more restful days and nights for Talavera.
Still, Talavera readily acknowledges that technology at the Shedd really is secondary to the people. He uses life-support operations as an example. When Shedd caregivers who aren’t suited up and diving in for up-close and personal encounters with the animals, they can monitor environmental variables such as tank temperature, ozone level and water flow, from a centralized server sitting on a virtual LAN segmented off the organization’s Gigabit Ethernet backbone. The data they view is collected from 30 or so Andover Control probes scattered throughout the aquarium.
Should the controllers be unable to communicate data back to that central server, alerts go out immediately, and manual testing processes kick in, Talavera says. “We have the technology, that’s true. But we also have individuals who are out there watching over the animals all the time. So we don’t only rely on the technology.”
