Highland Park Independent School District

Background: Highland Park Independent School District (ISD) is located in Dallas, Texas.  It is comprised of seven schools (one high school, two middle schools and four elementary schools) with a total of approximately 6,200 students.  Its mission statement is: “The Highland Park Independent School District, with an unyielding commitment to excellence, will provide an exceptional academic program that recognizes the unique potential of each student and integrates the intellectual, social, cultural, and physical aspects of learning."

Challenges: Highland Park ISD has 6,208 students, 432 classroom teachers, and 320 specialized teachers and administrators at eight different locations (seven school campuses and one administration building). Highland Park has approximately six computers in each classroom, in addition to libraries. Highland Park was dealing with the same problem facing every K-12 institution in the nation today: students using web proxies to circumvent current security devices and access pornography, instant messaging, peer-to-peer and other applications/content that the district wanted blocked.  In addition, Highland Park must comply with new laws such as the Child Internet Protection Act (CIPA), that make it a requirement to prevent students from viewing inappropriate material.

Issues: Due to district policies and national regulations such as the Child Internet Protection Act (CIPA), it is not only advantageous to keep students away from inappropriate material, it is also the law.  Highland Park had installed a firewall, an anti-virus engine and an URL content filter to keep students from accessing inappropriate material.  However, today’s tech savvy students were easily using web proxies to access the Internet and connect to whatever Web sites and applications they wanted.  Highland Park’s current security solutions only looked at a limited number of ports and protocols, and were therefore easily circumvented.

Solution provided by DeepNines: DeepNines Security Edge Platform (SEP) can detect and block unwanted proxy connections, obscene material, online gaming, peer-to-peer file sharing and instant messaging services on any port, with any IP address. The SEP is a unified threat management (UTM) device that also secures the entire network by providing denial of service (DOS) protection, anti-virus, intrusion prevention and firewall functionality. It complements the existing network infrastructure by stopping unwanted traffic that is allowed by typical point security solutions, and ensuring that all wanted traffic passes through the security and hardware devices that are already in place.

• VISIBILITY: DeepNines Edge Security Profiler (ESP) tool provides a real-time view of who is on the network, who they are communicating with, how much bandwidth they are consuming and what port(s) they are using. This in-depth view of the network quickly and easily shows which end users are behaving inappropriately and how.

• CONTROL: Through DeepNines Deep Packet Inspection (DPI) engine, every type of traffic on every port is scanned for unwanted proxy connections. Every attempt to connection to a proxy server is immediately blocked, forcing students to adhere to the security policies of the district. The DPI engine has proprietary signatures associated with blocking peer-to-peer file sharing, instant messaging systems, pornography, malware, spyware and phising. In addition, customized signatures can be created to block any other application desired regardless of port.

• SECURITY: The SEP integrates multiple security technologies into a single device to prevent attacks. The SEP includes firewall, behavior-based intrusion prevention, signature-based intrusion prevention, anti-virus, anti-spyware, anti-phishing and traffic management. The SEP’s patent-pending Zero Footprint Technology allows it to sit invisibly inline, with no IP or MAC address. The ability to maintain true transparency prevents both students and outsiders from locating the system and attempting to take it down.

“With our solution’s ability to look at every port and protocol, we are able to completely block access to inappropriate content.  We sit invisibly inline and inspect all network traffic, so even the most tech savvy students cannot find a work-around.  Our solution easily scales, and our customer base includes a variety of sizes and types of districts, from small districts like Highland Park to large districts with 35,000 students.”

Dan Jackson, President and COO of DeepNines Technologies

Summary: Over a six-week time period, DeepNines blocked a total of 6,731,202 different violations on the network, consisting of 5,035,212 protocol anomalies, 1,125,783 traffic anomalies and 570,207 signature matching malicious attempts. Included in these violations were 2,218 proxy server connection attempts; 26,424 peer-to-peer attempts and peer-to-peer file sharing; and 2,293 AOL and 18,983 Yahoo Messenger attempts detected and completely blocked by DeepNines. DeepNines improved network performance by allowing for the more effective utilization of existing technologies such as the Internet connection, saving 926 Kbps of bandwidth per second based solely on peer-to-peer downloads. There is an estimated network performance improvement of nearly 22% based on the total malicious traffic blocked at the edge of the network.

DeepNines Technologies
14643 Dallas Parkway, Suite 150
Dallas, TX 75254 USA
Tel: 1-214-273-6996

Download the complete case study
From Info Security Products Guide site: CLICK HERE

Recommend this to others: