The University of North Carolina (UNC) was evaluating the UnityOne Intrusion Prevention Appliances and Systems from Austin, TX-based TippingPoint Technologies when the Sobig.F virus hit.

“At the peak of the Sobig.F outbreak, we were receiving more than 100,000 infected messages per hour, and received over 1.5 million copies over a 12-hour period,” said John Oberlin, associate vice chancellor for information technology at UNC. “The UnityOne was so effective at blocking the virus that we immediately purchased several appliances in order to protect our entire network.”

In addition to UNC, five other new university customers have purchased the UnityOne to defend their networks against cyber attacks and threats.

The other new customers include the University of Texas (UT) Health Science Center at Houston, University of Miami Medical Center, University of Wisconsin Hospital and Clinics, Texas State University and Regis University.

TippingPoint says the UnityOne enables universities to manage and mitigate security risk along with legal risks associated with piracy.

In a recent case study with the University of Dayton, the UnityOne management system logs reported that the appliance blocked approximately one million worms, viruses and attacks each month since the installation in early 2003.

After implementing the UnityOne’s Peer-to-Peer Piracy Prevention feature, logs report over one million shared files were blocked each month from entering the university network, augmenting the organization’s bandwidth availability by 43 percent at its peak.

“Since introducing the UnityOne appliance into our network, it has more than paid for itself by preventing numerous worms and viruses from even entering our network,” said Randle Moore, senior network security analyst for the UT Health Science Center. “Over the past three days alone, the device has stopped — 30,000 to 45,000 virus-infected e-mails per hour from the Internet.”

TippingPoint is an ASIC-based intrusion prevention device, capable of analyzing traffic through Layer 7 and blocking malicious traffic at two gigabits-per-second with microsecond latencies. Every UnityOne comes with Peer-to-Peer Piracy Prevention capabilities.

TippingPoint: www.tippingpoint.com

UNC: www.unc.edu