Connect: April 2009

Monday, April 20, 2009

MIT's IS&T found sniffing on campus traffic


MIT Tech reported that the IS&T, the institute central IT department has been monitoring and recording all ingress and ingress network traffic on campus without an official policy or user notification. the monitoring practice was implemented on 1999 for security and network anomaly detection .

While there are some valid privacy issues here, I'm not going to address it here, you can find the gory details here.
There is something totally different that worries me - the graph showing the network traffic entering IS&T’s network security monitoring system, its a 1Gb interface and guess what...its fully utilized most of the time. Not so great for IDS and legal type applications.