Fergie's Tech Blog

School traps infected PCs in its web

Now here's an interesting story.

I'd be interested to hear more about it, if anyone would care to leave a pointer or comment. I Google'd for "Shelob" and came up with nothing more than hundreds of hits for the Lord of the Rings character, checked the EUDCAUSE 2005 program schedule, and also briefly looked around on the University of Indianapolis' website to no avail.

John Cox writes in NetworkWorld:

A team of IT staffers at the University of Indianapolis last week showed off a bundle of open-source tools and scripts it uses to trap and isolate PCs infected by viruses or spyware.

Dubbed Shelob, after the sinister giant spider in J.R.R. Tolkien's "Lord of the Rings," the software identifies suspect traffic patterns, identifies the computers involved and then shunts them to a closed virtual LAN. Users get an appropriate Web screen, explaining what's happened and how to fix their PC or whom to call for help.

Shelob's inner workings were shown off last week in Orlando, Fla., at Educause, the annual user conference for IT professionals in higher education.

posted by Fergie @ 10/20/2005 01:14:00 PM