Re: The worm author finally revealed!

[Paul Schmehl <pauls () utdallas edu>]

On Fri, 2003-01-31 at 14:07, Ron DuFresne wrote:
> if deployed on all commisioned servers, then yer protected at host
> level...
Ever priced a firewall for Windows?  Oh, I set up ipchains, iptables,
ipfw or whatever on the *nix boxes I maintain, but what do you do for
Windows?  AFAIK there are no free firewalls for Windows servers, and the
ones that I've looked at ain't cheap.
> again, in most cases, depending upon the HW/SW choices made, two boxes and
> the proper number of interfaces.
Depending upon the volume of traffic too.
> > It gets expensive in a hurry.  Now do you still need to wonder why some
> > networks have no firewall and no DMZ?
>
> The real expense is in maint of the equipment, and testing/auditing
> periodically...
...but who's picking nits?  I was just trying to add some reality to the
utopia that some people seem to live in.
> But, what does interest me here, is that if utdallas has no real security
> policy, and no perimiter defences, what does the Adjunct Information
> Security Officer really do?  Tis a real question and not meant as a slam.
I guess you haven't caught on yet.  I'm not telling you what UTD is
doing.  I'm telling you what is the "norm" or "average" for edu.  Trust
me, we have a security policy in place and published (but I want more -
more policies and more specifics), and we have permimeter defenses in
place, and we have monitoring in place, and we force good passwords,
etc., etc.

What do I do?  Well I'm responsible for many things, but in the
categories you seem interested in; I handle all antivirus protection for
the campus (have for years) and I'm responsible for IDS on campus. 
Others handle the switching, routing and firewalls, but I have
(respected) input on what gets blocked.  I do the investigations when
there's a breakin, and I get to generate all the reams of paper for the
reports we have to file.  At least, that's the part I think *you* wanted
to hear.

-- 
Paul Schmehl (pauls () utdallas edu)
Adjunct Information Security Officer
The University of Texas at Dallas
http://www.utdallas.edu/~pauls/
AVIEN Founding Member

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