Websense(R) Security Labs(TM) has received reports of a Trojan keylogger aimed at the users of Habbo, a popular social networking site for teenagers. As of last month, Habbo's entry on Wikipedia said that over 8 million unique visitors access Habbo's Web sites around the world every month.

The party involved in spreading this malicious code poses as a third-party software tool developer for Habbo. Among the "tools" available for download, which will supposedly give the Habbo user an edge in the game is a file named ProRig.V9.exe (MD5: b80305ace7d4a01541467511df256287).

Unsuspecting victims who seek the touted benefits of this fake tool would instead have their own desktops compromised with spyware. KCN recommends caution when trying out new third-party applications developed for Web 2.0 and social networking Web sites: especially ones with APIs open for third-party developers.

Establishments that provide devices for students to use at home etc, should be aware of this issue, and ensure that adequate security is in place to ensure that undesirable software is not brought into the internal network.

Regards

Marc Turner

Kent Community Network

http://www.rm.com/thebasement/

http://www.software4students.co.uk/

Many establishments may wish to utilise Google for its fantastic searching capabilities, however, some features are undesirable in a school environment, such as Google mobile etc.

The KCN team have worked closely with Websense to develop a regular expression, which will permit access to only the Google search engine functions, and deny access to other google services such as mobile, images etc.

Should you wish to implement this, please complete the following actions:
(Note, this only applies to establishments who have been migrated to version 6.3)

Block access to the “Search engines and portals category”

Create a new custom category called “google search”

Add the following expression as a URL pattern in the  “google search” category

http://(www\.)?google\.(com|co\.uk|ie|fr|de|co\.jp|it)(/search.*|/$|$)

This will also function when using a yes list policy

Regards

Marc Turner
WAN Development
Kent Community Network

Websense will be making changes to the master URL database on July the 17th

These changes will affect several categories present within the database

The current category (Web-based Email) is being separated into General Email (for sites that provide email services open for general use) and Organizational Email (for corporate and institutional email systems).

A new category Text and Media Messaging, will be added, this allows for management of sites that enable the sending of messages and other content via SMS, EMS, MMS, or similar protocols.

In addition, two existing subcategories are being renamed to better reflect the nature of the evolving web:
• Message Boards & Clubs is being renamed to Message Boards & Forums
• Personal Websites is being renamed to Social Networking & Personal Sites

Each renamed category inherits the policy actions you defined for the category before the rename.
It is very important that your filtering policies are reviewed on July the 18th to ensure that appropriate action is applied to the new categories.

Marc Turner
Kent Community Network

The scheme will launch in June 2007 through Software4Learners, and more information will be available then. In the mean time you can visit the Irish Software4Learners site at http://software4students.co.uk/index.htm to find out more.

[http://www.kenttrustweb.org.uk/docs/WiFiSafety_010507_SC.doc]

The KCN Report [Safety-WirelessLinks-May2007.doc]

And the list of references[RFsafety-References-6May07.doc]

Hi All 

 A new CPE (Customer Premises Equipment) device has been chosen to replace the Cisco 3550/3560 switches in all KCN secondary schools.  This device has been chosen as it provides best of breed performance for IP Routing with the additional advantage of “on box” firewall functionality and DMZ hosting, meaning secondary schools will now be able to host external services within their network without the need for an additional PiX firewall device.

The Unisys PMO should be contacting the first phase schools within the next couple of weeks for installation over the next two months.  Phase two schools will be upgraded in conjunction with the planned Websense server upgrades beginning next term.

For more information please see the attached information sheet or visit the Cisco web site.

For further details, please feel free to contact a member of the KCN Team.

Gavin Hutchinson

Kent Community Network

As we move the focus from connecting schools to continual service improvement, an appraisal of the performance of the Kent Communuty Network (KCN) for 2006 was an important baseline.  The report gives an overview of the KCN in a number of aspects including technical performance and service delivery. 

We are proud of the technical capability of KCN, but there is always more work to do to expand the facilties available.   Please see the attached report, or look at the broadband pages on www.eiskent.co.uk.   

Hello All

As you’re all aware, there is a category within websense, called “bandwidth PG”, this category contains the following sub categories:

Internet Radio and TV
Internet Telephony
Peer-to-peer File Sharing
Personal Network storage and backup
Streaming Media

Previously, this category was not available, due to it being an optional extra, which carried a rather large price.  However, as a result of recent meetings between Websense and the KCN, our licence has now been updated to include the Bandwidth PG category.

You should be able to apply filtering to this category tomorrow morning.

We would be very interested to know what decisions schools are making regarding this category, please comment with whether you are allowing or denying.

To modify a category set, please reference the Websense Enterprise Manager user guide, available via the following link.

 http://www.eiskent.co.uk/default.cfm?id=27&pid=6

If you require any assistance configuring the Websense filtering within your establishment, please contact the KCN helpdesk on (01622) 206040, or email eis.support@kent.gov.uk

Enjoy!

Marc Turner
Kent Community Network

We've recently implemented an internal DNS structure on the KCN.  This means that if you try to access a resource based at another school from within the KCN, this should now work automatically.

So, for example, if I'm at school A but I normally work for school B, I can visit http://mail.schoolb.kent.sch.uk and access my emails remotely via the web client for my mail server without any fuss.  Previously this would have required fiddling with DNS and creating dummy zones at 'school A' but will now work seamlessly.

To ensure that you benefit from this you'll need to be using the KCN forwarders (172.31.81.46 - primary for West Kent and 172.31.49.46 - primary for East Kent) where the zones are located.

Neat eh!
Tom Bell

To gather information for the Kent Community Network (KCN) report to schools 2006, we've generated some statistics in relation to latency across the KCN.

We were pleasantly suprised with the results.  The polling engine is based at the core of the Maidstone WAN centre, and polls all nodes on the KCN every 60 seconds.  Typical latency from the polling engine to a school CPE is 2 milliseconds (ms), this is very impressive.

We decided to time the latency from the furthest node (school switch) to the West of the KCN to the furthest node East (Swanley > Wingham) which is 10 hops, the latency round trip time (RTT) was 4ms, which is very impressive.

Although the Internet is beyond the control of the KCN, the KCN obtains its internet access via KentishMAN and JANET this provides advantages when accessing websites peered with JANET.  Websites such as the British Museum, BBC and British Pathe are peered with JANET, and therefore traffic destined to these websites will go via JANET, a network we know is reliable.

Below is a chart illustrating the latency from a client machine on a school LAN to a website peered with JANET:

Below is a chart illustrating the latency to websites which are not peered with JANET:

The new IronPort Mail relay Servers have now been in place for several months.  Last week, of the 3.45 million messages processed by both servers, 93% (over 3.2 million) were classed as threat messages of which 82% were stopped by reputation filtering at the connection phase.  Only 11% of all messages were actually processed "on box".

The mail relays now have a centralised tracking and reporting server which allows our helpdesk to quickly and effieciently track any false positives, although currently these are few and far between.

For additional information on the mail relays, feel free to contact any member of the KCN Team.

Gavin Hutchinson

The huge investment in fibre-optic cable for Kent schools looks to be greatly increasing the reliability of the service.  The figures for each school on KCN (exclusing ADSL) have been analysed for the past term.  The average availability is running at 99.95% which is a little over the contracted level.  More details will be posted by January 2007.

A Happy Christmas and New year from Peter, Andy, Gavin and Marc at KCN.

The Advisory Service and KCN have produced posters that reinforce the safe and responsible use of the Internet.  One of these posters, or your own, should be displayed in any room with Internet access.  Three A4 posters have been designed for KS1, KS2 and for secondary. 

For free copies, please drop into the EIS Office on your next course, or send a substantial SAE (A4 full size) with at least a 56p stamp, depending on numbers requested.

The intention with the KCN Blog is to publish information more frequently to KCN users, ie the ICT Co-ordinators and Network Managers in Kent schools.  This particular blog is not currently intended as a general discussion forum, more as a moderated information distribution - to keep it lean and relevant!   

Comments on whether a discussion Blog is also required would be welcomed, or should we leave feedback to the email list?

peter.banbury(at)kent.gov.uk