Fremont, Calif., a Silicon Valley city of 200,000, doesn’t sound like a top target for network hacks. But when war began last spring in Iraq, the city’s Web site, at www.ci.fremont.ca.us, received scores of hits from locations in the Middle East. The city had just installed ActiveScout intrusion-prevention software from ForeScout Technologies Inc. of San Mateo, Calif. The software has a map that shows the geographic origin of attempted attacks. “It really opened our eyes,” said Mike Towan, Fremont’s network administrator. “We were surprised at the kind and amount of traffic at our gateway that we weren’t aware of before.” Towan described ActiveScout as a hybrid of honey pot—a system that lures hackers, then blocks their IP addresses—with intrusion detection. ActiveScout learned the network rapidly and began to offer up services to suspected hackers “to tell them the site is wide open,” he said. “When they come back to exploit what they think are vulnerabilities, ActiveScout blocks them.” Full Story
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