The sixth largest commercial chamber in the US found that, despite deploying firewalls and anti-virus systems, rapidly propagating worms and viruses still found their way onto its internal network via infected laptops.
Mobile workers would pick up malware on hotel networks, wireless networks or home networks, then bring the infection with them to the office.
To combat this problem the Chamber, which represents the interests of more than 6,000 member businesses, rolled out an Inverted Firewall from Mirage Networks. This system allows the organisation to see infected devices as they connect to the network, use behavioural detection to identify malicious traffic and then automatically block them from the network.
"Protecting internal networks is critical to overall security," said Jim Meyer, director of technology at the Greater Cincinnati Chamber of Commerce.
"Before we had the Inverted Firewall, worms were a huge problem. After one attack, it took us two full days to get every machine patched and cleaned, leaving users without network access and unable to do their jobs. The Inverted Firewall, because it can immediately detect and block worm traffic at the source of the problem, allows us to isolate and remediate the threat before network availability is affected."
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