Impact

Penn State migrating to 'next-generation' cybersecurity firewall platform

UNIVERSITY PARK, Pa. — Institutions of higher education rely on sharing knowledge and information to promote collaboration and educational achievement. However, as a result of this openness, their information technology (IT) networks can become major targets for foreign intelligence agencies, cybercriminals and hacktivists.

The Office of Information Security (OIS) partners with Penn State IT to protect Penn State’s computer and network resources. OIS also leads digital identity, access to information, security training and privacy efforts at the University.

To combat these threats and bolster OIS’ efforts to increase and assure the security for the entire University community, several projects are underway to move Penn State toward a more integrated, information-centric approach to cybersecurity.

As part of the cybersecurity initiative, a project to migrate the University’s many decentralized firewall systems to a “next-generation,” enterprise firewall platform has begun.

Like traditional firewalls, Next-Generation Firewalls limit access, but also perform additional filtering and antivirus functions to combat all levels of malicious activity on a computer network. Most importantly, they collect evidence of breaches. Although firewalls help prevent malicious activity on a computer network, all students, faculty and staff members should continue to use antivirus software and set up automatic updates to be protected from the latest threats.

Last month, Penn State IT successfully installed the new firewall platform on the University’s network border and applied rulesets based on Administrative Policy AD95 as an added security measure to protect the Penn State wireless service. A ruleset specifies what services are let through the firewall, and which ones are kept out. These changes were transparent and had no impact to Penn State wireless users.

“By investing in a new clustered, Next-Generation Firewall we can enable Penn State to better detect and stop cyberattacks,” said Don Welch, Penn State’s chief information security officer.

The enterprise firewall project is a collaborative effort among several campus, college and administrative units throughout Penn State and is sponsored by Penn State IT and OIS. Other projects within the cybersecurity planning initiative also will reduce the University’s power consumption, decrease redundancy, free up space, increase capacity and allow IT units across Penn State to strategically and safely reinvest resources to meet their specific goals.

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Last Updated February 27, 2018