Vernier Networks today announced the availability of the Vernier Virus Filter for its award winning family of WLAN distributed gateways (AM-6500, IS-6500 and CS-6500) that allow IT staff to quickly and easily prevent the spread and effects of worms and viruses such as the recent Welchia, MSBlast and Sobig.
The Vernier Virus Filter is available at no cost to customers registered with Vernier for support, and takes advantage of the advanced packet inspection and filtering engine designed into each Vernier WLAN gateway.
"The proliferation of viruses and worms is reaching epidemic proportions, causing severe outages in computing and network services while overburdened and under resourced IT departments attempt to react," said Doug Klein, CTO of Vernier Networks. "Wireless devices can render otherwise secure, well managed networks vulnerable to attack. Because wireless devices move from place to place, they can become infected on one network, and then unleash that infection on another network, well behind its firewalls and other traditional defenses. At Vernier we have developed a unique distributed architecture for our WLAN gateways that cost effectively provides protection right at the user edge, stopping unauthorized traffic from authenticated users before it has the chance to infect the wired network."
In a period that has seen the worst outbreak of computer virus and worm activity since the Code Red and Nimda worms surfaced a year ago, the per packet filtering and redirect capabilities of the Vernier Networks WLAN gateways have proven to be invaluable tools to prevent the spread and detrimental effects of the latest outbreak of worms. In the event of an outbreak, the Vernier Networks WLAN gateway contains the spread of the virus, stops any Denial of Service traffic at the user edge and determines which clients have contracted the virus, returning a list of matching sessions including date, MAC address, and most importantly, the UserID of the client. The system administrator can then take the necessary actions to remove the worm from the infected clients.
"We had a large number of students return to campus with laptops that were either vulnerable to or already infected by the Nachi/Welchia worm," said Christopher Chin, Network Exorcist at the University of California, Berkeley. "This worm began to replicate rapidly, and caused infected clients to send large volumes of ICMP traffic through the campus network, severely degrading performance and effectively creating a Distributed Denial of Service (DDoS) situation for our wireless networks. Using the custom packet filtering capabilities of the Vernier system we have deployed throughout campus, we defined filters for our wireless users that differentiated ICMP traffic generated by the Welchia worm from legitimate ICMP requests, effectively halting the worm's spread at the WLAN gateways."
In addition to these precise virus-filtering controls, the Vernier Networks System provides role-based access controls, unique anti-MAC address spoofing, and other essential security features for wireless networks.
Vernier Networks develops innovative systems and software to protect, manage, and enhance wireless networks. Vernier's user-aware, intelligent networking technology allows network managers to centralize wireless LAN usage policies, secure wireless network access at the edge, and deploy scalable wireless mobility across the enterprise.