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Beat a denial of service, save $200,000.
A StormWorm attack knocked out email at Hillsborough Community College. ThreatSTOP got service back, now blocks 100,000 attacks a week, and pushed back an email server upgrade by two years.
One misconfiguration, then no email.
HCC was installing a new "best practices" security system from Cisco, Sophos, Applied Watch and Microsoft on its existing network. Because of a misconfiguration, a StormWorm attack overwhelmed the new system. The result was effectively a denial of service that shut down email, and complaints from students, faculty and administrators were immediate and loud.
Back online, and $200,000 ahead.
With ThreatSTOP in place as the first line of defense at the firewall, HCC recovered from the attack, restored email, and put off a round of hardware upgrades.
The college
Hillsborough Community College (HCC) serves the Tampa, Florida metro area with six campuses, two satellite sites, a corporate training center and a distance learning program. It has 47,000 students and a 2,500-member faculty.
Every location connects through one central hub. HCC's infrastructure includes Microsoft Exchange Server, a Cisco ASA and an SMTP gateway, with layered anti-spam and antivirus defenses: Applied Watch at each location, and Sophos, Cisco IPS and Intelligent Messaging Control in the Exchange Server.
The problem
A StormWorm attack overwhelmed HCC's newly installed, misconfigured security system, effectively a denial of service. Email went down, and students, faculty and administrators could not get to email or the web.
"In the ensuing fire drill to find a solution, quickly, we came upon ThreatSTOP, and decided to try it in the spirit of 'hey, there's nothing to lose here' since it was such an easy and cost effective service to deploy," said Steve Gorham, CIO of HCC.
What ThreatSTOP did
HCC installed ThreatSTOP as the first line of defense at the firewall. Most of the spam and other malware bombarding the college, which had been draining its resources, was blocked immediately. That let HCC recover from the StormWorm attack and restore service.
ThreatSTOP also caught misconfigured DNS servers that were querying phishing zone servers, because they were querying recursively instead of using forwarders only. And it blocked the thousands of inbound attacks a day that had been plaguing the college.
ThreatSTOP delayed my need to upgrade my email servers by two years. That's $200,000 we put into the classroom instead of hardware.
The result
"The alternatives we were evaluating before ThreatSTOP involved upgrading our spam gateways, buying more load balancers, increasing RAM, the list goes on," said HCC's system administrator. "On top of that, it's giving me the equivalent of one virtual FTE employee by cutting down a lot of the manual intervention I needed to do before, worry free."
- $200,000 saved over two years.
- 100,000 attacks blocked per week.
- Email service restored.
Why HCC chose ThreatSTOP.
Stop attacks before they reach your servers.
Put ThreatSTOP in front of your network as the first line of defense at the firewall. Request a trial, or talk to an engineer.