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SecurLAN Commercial Systems
For the commercial sectors, a successful organization is only as strong as its intellectual property. Sensitive data must be protected from unauthorized access to ensure corporate integrity and confidentiality. Due to the growing regulatory compliance measures (SOX, GLBA, HIPAA and others), data protection is no longer a corporate choice; it's the law.
According to industry analysts, a significant percentage of network downtime can be attributed to physical layer conditions. In today's commercial IT world, information security controls that are designed to prevent, limit, and detect access to computing resources and devices are often lacking in their ability to protect the confidentiality and availability of information and information resources. Network Security Sensors can help prevent physical attacks and physical intrusions from internal and external sources, and they also protect against accidental intrusions and other types of insider threats.
In today's networks, there are three primary cable types: unshielded twisted pair (UTP) category 5 (or higher) and fiber optic. The risk of an attacker accessing the physical cabling (cable trays; interduct; conduit) is important to consider because that level of access can bypass other security controls and provide the attacker with easy access to information (provided encryption is not used). UTP cable is very easy to tap, but it was thought years ago that fiber was immune to cable taps. We now know that this is not the case.
It has now been shown that it is relatively easy to "tap" information out of an optical fiber with negligible interference to the optical signal. Hand-held coupling devices, originally designed as testing tools, are commercially available and can easily be employed by those wishing to engage in information theft. Additionally, if an attacker gains physical access to a wiring closet or the fiber cable as it runs in a cable tray above a drop ceiling, tapping the cable by installing couplers is another possibility.
As a tool for network diagnostics, utilizing a physical intrusion detection sensor for physical network security can help determine if a threat is cyber (logical) or physical - and thereby accelerate the investigation and identification of the network problem.
In the context of "Total Network Protection", Layer One security considerations, and the awareness of the vulnerability at the physical layer is projected to increase in importance as security and risk managers seek a complete threat mitigation posture.
Please contact us for additional information
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