Higher-ed networks begin circling the wagons [college network security]

Ever since peer-to-peer file-sharing programs became popular in the late 1990s, college campuses have been perceived as a Wild West of profligate bandwidth use and lax security - a perfect digital incubator for viruses, spyware, and illegal downloads of copyright-protected material. Yet little hard data is available to help campus officials or their prospective government and enterprise partners pinpoint the scope and origins of possible attacks on college networks. To address this lack, a team of networking researchers is undertaking the first distributed intrusion-detection project to compile network traffic data specific to the higher-education sector.