Challenge

The University of Texas at San Antonio (UTSA) needed stronger visibility and control over calls coming into and out of their university voice systems and network. They also wanted real-time, network-wide protection against Telephony Denial of Service (TDoS) attacks and robocalls.

UTSA had been self-managing its voice security using SecureLogix® Call Defense System. However, UTSA’s relatively small voice security team could not keep up with the growing volume of threatening and spam related calls coming into the university’s phone system.

Background

UTSA is the largest university in San Antonio and the eighth-largest in the state of Texas. It includes four campuses across the San Antonio metropolitan area that span 725 acres of land. Established in 1969, UTSA has become the third largest institution within the University of Texas System by enrollment with over 30,000 students.

Approach

In 2019, UTSA added the Call Secure™ Managed Service from SecureLogix for its updated, proactive protection against emerging threats. These professional services protect UTSA’s voice systems and communications from attack, disruption, fraud, and abuse.

UTSA maintains a centralized voice architecture, resulting in fewer communication nodes to manage. However, centralization can also result in more vulnerability. UTSA has addressed this added vulnerability and strengthened its security posture with the most current caller threat profiles and advanced attack defense tools from SecureLogix.

This ability to remotely monitor, filter and secure calls across the university’s large voice environment has been critical given the educational institution’s relatively small telecom team.

Result

SecureLogix has eliminated UTSA’s spoofed, spam and harassing calls and allowed the university to focus on migrate and upgrade its phone systems and voice infrastructure without any disruption to or loss of phone call traffic.

UTSA also realized ancillary security benefits on its outbound traffic. If someone hacks into an enterprise’s phone system, a malicious actor could make unauthorized toll calls to collect a fraction of the generated fraudulent revenue. SecureLogix prevents this brand of toll fraud for the university by detecting anomalies in the pattern of outbound calls and blocking fraud attempts.

Because international faculty and students do make legitimate calls, the need for targeted blocking of outbound calls is as important as the precise filtering of incoming attack, threatening and spam calls.

Solution

  • Call Defense System
  • Call Secure Managed Service