Read All About It: Newspaper Is Secure

The Las Vegas Review-Journal (LVRJ) was recently looking for ways to prevent unauthorized access to its local-area networks (LANs) and to contain malware. The publication's mission-critical internal networks support story submissions, page layout and prepress activities for more than 1,500 network users, many of them mobile reporters and contributors working on a mix of Mac, Windows and Unix machines. When connecting to the LAN, those mobile workers were bypassing the perimeter firewall, unwittingly subjecting the publication's network to threats that could potentially cause downtime or allow for unauthorized activity.

With a daily circulation of more than 160,000 and a Sunday circulation of 224,000, the LVRJ had previously attempted to address these issues by segmenting its LANs with static IP addresses and Access Control Lists (ACLs), but that solution turned out to be overly complex. In addition, since the paper has a small IT department, the approach was consuming valuable IT resources and negatively affecting the progress of other projects.

A more robust solution came in the form of Milpitas, Calif.-based ConSentry's Secure LAN Controller, an identity-based networking solution that enables LVRJ to control which applications and resources individuals and authorized user groups have access to. More specifically, ConSentry's CS2400 Secure LAN Controller and InSight Manager allow for the tracking of user activity by coupling user identity with IP and MAC addresses as they authenticate to the LAN. This centralized view of individual user activity has helped improve compliance reporting and troubleshooting for network and security incidents.