Network World’s Tim Greene writes that a pair of Harvard University IT staffers last week released a free virtual appliance that supports their open source network access control platform — just one of many free NAC tools springing up to address security-hungry customers. Called PacketFence Zero Effort NAC (ZEN), the virtual appliance consists of an operating system image that runs on Linux or Windows and performs policy checks of devices as they log on to networks.
PacketFence ZEN is the latest innovation among about a dozen free NAC packages, most them created at colleges in reaction to the same Sasser and Blaster worms that led commercial vendors — such as Cisco, Microsoft and the Trusted Computing Group industry consortium — to develop NAC for profit.
Complete story here .
More on Harvard’s network group here .
