"The TippingPoint IPS saved us from a potential disaster," confirmed Freddie Manint, chief information officer and F.B.I. threat assessment coordinator for the state of Louisiana Criminal Justice System. "This episode alone justified our investment in the system. It's very comforting to have the Digital Vaccine service deliver new filters to us weekly or immediately when critical vulnerabilities and threats emerge, guarding our operating systems and other network components."
Seeking to increase the security of its more than 45,000 court cases and investigations, the state of Louisiana Criminal Justice System deployed a TippingPoint Intrusion Prevention System (IPS) from the TippingPoint division of 3Com on its gigabit Ethernet network. The decision to upgrade its security has proved to be a sound investment.
The TippingPoint IPS protects the Louisiana justice system against a broad range of threats, including denial of service (DoS) attacks, worms and spyware, virtually eliminating costly network disruptions that could impede court operations. Moreover, the system's Digital Vaccine service automatically updates the Criminal Justice System's security capabilities as needed, often daily, to thwart the latest threats and protect in advance of attacks. It also performs bandwidth management, enabling the court system to cleanse the network of malicious traffic and throttle non-critical traffic, such as peer-to-peer file sharing.
Having eliminated redundant data entry and manual data sharing, departmental administrators use the 3Com network to open, cross-reference, update and seal case data, such as court dates and jury selections. Staff and nearly 100,000 national court and authorized public users also instantly retrieve open case files to further enhance judicial efficiencies, and litigants can access trial dates, times and locations online.
By safeguarding the gigabit Ethernet network, the TippingPoint IPS helps ensure the privacy and safety of communications to and from the court's 500 staff members and associated criminal justice agencies, including the Federal Bureau of Investigation (F.B.I.), the state police and the court of appeals. The solution also enables staff to access court dates and locations, subpoenas, warrants and defendant criminal history data quickly and securely, in compliance with federal guidelines, such as the Federal Information Processing Standards (FIPS) and the Health Insurance Portability and Accountability Act (HIPAA).
"With the pervasive protection of our TippingPoint solution, our security infrastructure is second to none," said Doug Welborn, clerk of court, State of Louisiana Criminal Justice System. "The TippingPoint system is so effective, the Homeland Security Department and courts nationwide are adopting it."
The Louisiana justice system further benefits from the TippingPoint Security Management System (SMS), which allows its criminal management information systems (CMIS) staff to obtain comprehensive reports and real-time graphs on traffic statistics, blocked attacks and information on network hosts and services, quickly and easily. The judicial system monitors its entire network in real time and records baselines for its network three times a day. Unlike competing systems that require complex installations and require users to manually select filters, the TippingPoint IPS features a suggested configuration that allows for plug and play, set and forget protection.
The TippingPoint IPS works in tandem with the 3Com Switch 7700, which delivers Layer 3 switching and security features that let IT staff segment federal criminal records, state civil and criminal court traffic and family court business into virtual LANs (VLANs). In addition, the Switch 7700's port-level traffic management capability allows the justice system to monitor and direct network traffic on the fly, further ensuring network performance as loads change from day to day.
The switches are linked by the 3Com's proprietary technology providing speed and redundancy without the cost and complexity of additional switches. Leveraging the Switch 4900/4924s' delivery of Gigabit Ethernet connectivity over both fiber and copper cabling, the justice system also dramatically reduced implementation costs by using existing copper wire to link the switches, servers and Switch 4400s' edge systems. By utilizing the 3Com Network Supervisor to provide a total view of every network node, the justice system's IT staff proactively manage the network, lowering its total cost of ownership.
