IT Professionals

What You Need to Know

The technical environment at The University of Arizona is complex. In addition to the central services provided by University Information Technology Services (UITS), many departments, schools and colleges on campus provide an additional layer of technology services to their constituents. ‘Technical staff,’ ‘developers,’ ‘programmers’, and ‘support staff’ all cross a broad range of functions, from networking to desktop support to programming in many languages.

Border Firewall Security Services

The University of Arizona border/perimeter firewalls are intended to prevent unsolicited, and frequently malicious, traffic from the Internet at large from hitting the University's campus network. By default, a small list of TCP/IP ports associated with frequently vulnerable services is blocked on the perimeter. It is strongly recommended that network managers work with SecOps to establish a higher level of firewall protection than the minimal baseline provided, either by setting up a managed local firewall or opting to have their subnet blocked on the perimeter firewall.

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Intrusion Detection

UITS Security Operations may block clearly malicious traffic from off-campus, and also compromised machines on-campus.

Externally Blocked (Borderblocked)
Block Compromised On-Campus Computers

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Managed Local Firewalls

Managed local firewalls use Cisco network firewall contexts or reflexive access-lists which Security Operations deploys on request in conjunction with departmental IT staff to help protect a specific network/VLAN. Stateful Cisco firewall contexts are available for most networks which are physically on-campus, and reflexive access-lists can be used in most cases where firewall contexts are not available.

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Managing Security of IT Resources

Security Operations (SecOps) is tasked with protecting the University of Arizona network. Our primary function is the deployment and maintenance of the network security infrastructure, composed of devices such as firewalls, intrusion detection systems, and virtual private networks (VPN). SecOps also acts as a triage point for security incidents, provides containment and prevention guidance to departments and network managers in the event of a security breach, and may block either external IPs or internal network devices due to security threats. We also offer vulnerability scanning services, either by request or setting up an account for on-demand self-service scanning.

Network Manager Database

UITS maintains a database with information on which network manager is responsible for which IP ranges (subnets).

If you are a network manager, please verify that the subnets listed in the Network Manager's Database are under your responsibility and accurate. If you need to update your subnets listed or your contact information, click on the My Profile link after logging into the NetMgr DB with your NetID. If there are subnets which you maintain but are not listed as yours, you may register for them by clicking on the Register Subnet link. If you have feedback regarding this database and the web front-end, send an email to: noc-request@list.arizona.edu

Operating System/Network Vulnerability Scanning Tools

The University Information Security Office (ISO) has launched the security review program, which includes scanning of all campus web applications and critical servers. The goal of the program is to identify vulnerabilities for correction before they can be exploited. Qualys Web Scanner and IBM AppScan are two free tools which require prerequisites prior to use. To learn about these prerequisites, scanning details, and how to request access to the scanning tools visit the Operating System/Network Vulnerability Scanning webpage.There are also several other free tools available to help determine if your software needs any security updates.

Free Tools

For information on Resources and University Policy and Standards visit the UA InfoSec webpage.

Telephone Services

There are a wide variety of telephone services available to UA departments, affiliates and third parties. UITS offers telephone services ranging from basic to multi-line to Voice over IP (VoIP) telephony, can establish off-campus services for you and provides other telephone needs such as telephone conferencing, voice mail, caller ID, etc.

User Groups

Security

VPN for Network Managers

MPLS VPN Group Setup Information

As the campus moves towards full implementation of MPLS, individual VPN groups with small sets of IP addresses will be phased out. Unfortunately, departmental VPN groups were created in the past as a form of authorization to various networks and resources on those networks. This practice does not scale to a campus our size. Authorization to resouces is the responsibility of the resource owner and needs to be done at or near the resource.

UITS Secops will be creating VPN groups for each of the MPLS VRFs (buckets). The intent of this will be working in conjunction with the CATNET administrators to provide VPN groups that are automatically populated with NetIDs of the folks associated with each of the MPLS VRFs. These groups will be augmented with Netmgr's groups where DCCs and others with temporary NetIDs may be added. The automatically populated and Netmgr's groups will be combined so that every elligible NetID can be authenticated to use the MPLS VRF VPN group.

Visit the VPN Service webpage

Professional Organizations & Conferences

ACM SIGCHI (Special Interest Group on Computer-Human Interaction) — brings together people working on the design, evaluation, implementation, and study of interactive computing systems for human use
ACM SIGUCCS (Special Interest Group on University and College Computing Services) — an association of professionals who support and manage the diverse aspects of information technology services in higher education institutions.
CalConnect — promoting the interoperable exchange of calendaring and scheduling information between dissimilar programs, platforms, and technologies
EDUCAUSE — a nonprofit association whose mission is to advance higher education by promoting the intelligent use of information technology
Gartner Events — various IT and business strategy events (University of Arizona faculty and staff have free access. Visit the Gartner login location at UA Site License).
Jasig (formerly JA-SIG, Java Architectures Special Interest Group) — consortium of educational institutions and commercial affiliates sponsoring open source software projects for higher education
Sakai — community source software for education
SANS — information security training and certification
Super Computing Conference — International Conference for High Performance Computing, Networking, Storage, and Analysis
UC Computing Services Conference (UCCSC) — a conference on providing and supporting information technology at UC campuses
USENIX (Advanced Computing Systems Association) — holds a variety of conferences for "the community of engineers, system administrators, scientists, and technicians working on the cutting edge of the computing world."

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