TTC v7.0 Plugs WiFi Security Hole

School / District: Killeen Independent SD
State: Texas
District Size: 39,000 students
Solution: Total Traffic Control
Focus: Wi-fi security

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Problem
With the increasing popularity of Wi-Fi enabled phones, laptops, game systems, and personal gadgets, school network administrators have encountered yet another problem with providing safe, secure Internet access—exceeding their filtering license with too many concurrent sessions. Mobile devices are effectively hijacking the school network. Any session begun after the filtering license hits its upper limit goes unchecked, never passing through the gateway filter.

For example, say you have 20,000 computers on your network, but at any given time only 12,000 are connected to the Internet. If you paid for 12,000 concurrent sessions to be filtered, when session 12,001 fires up and accesses the Internet, it is not filtered. With student- and staff-owned laptops and iPhones making their way on to campuses, it's easy to exceed your allotted number of sessions, which leaves chunks of lab computers unfiltered or without Internet access.

Just such "network hijackings" were common at Killeen Independent School District in Texas. Karl Walker, Executive Director for Technology Services at the district, explains, "Even with our 10GB bandwidth, we'd have folks in Accounts Payable, students in computer labs--legitimate users everywhere--who couldn't access the Internet because we had too many users on the network. We had no way of differentiating necessary student or staff traffic from unnecessary traffic."

Solution
Total Traffic Control (TTC) v7.0 includes the ability to force all unknown devices to authenticate for Internet access, thereby handing control back to network administrators.

If anyone tries to access that speedy school Internet connection with their Wi-Fi gadget, TTC will pop up in the browser and ask for a school username and password.

Walker comments, "TTC's tight integration with Active Directory was a big driver in our decision to go with Lightspeed. Now we can fetter out all of what I call 'false positives.' As a result we immediately reclaimed about 90% of our bandwidth and eliminated the recurring 'no access' problem."

About Killeen Independent School District
Killeen Independent School District (KISD) serves several communities near Killeen, TX, and the surrounding rural areas. With an enrollment near 39,000 during the 2007-08 school year, KISD employs more than 5,480 teachers and support personnel to serve the district's 50 campuses. Seventy-five percent of its computers are Macs.