Educational Discounts

CERT is HEAnet’s single contact point for clients dealing with computer security incidents. If a client is concerned that they may be experiencing an intrusion or attack, CERT rapidly provides support, advice and expertise.

To ensure prompt support for the CERT mailbox, we have put the following extended hours monitoring in place:

CERT provides the following to all HEAnet clients

• Technical assistance as to what to do in the case of an incident
• The collection, analysis and reporting of statistics on incidents
• Notifications to sites that they may have been the source, intermediary or target of an attack, as they can often be unaware.
• CERT is also ready to assist all HEAnet clients who wish to pro-actively seek support for any perceived security issues and vulnerabilities.

HEAnet provides a DNS service for HEAnet clients based on high availability primary and secondary nameservers. This service is ideal for small organisations which do not have the resources to operate nameservers and maintain DNS information themselves.

In essence, DNS is like a phonebook that links hostnames e.g https://heanet.ie to a specific IP address. When you open the page in your browser, it queries DNS for the IP address and matches the url https://heanet.ie to the appropriate IP address.

HEAnet have partnered with JISC – to provide our clients with a Multi Tb/s DDoS volumetric mitigation service.

To prevent DDoS attacks, we monitor traffic to client networks in order to automatically detect anomalies. The service “scrubs” traffic, removing the attack traffic and letting good traffic continue as normal. This can be enabled for any specific host in a client network, or for subnets up to a /24.

This service is automatically in place for all HEAnet IP Connectivity clients.

Real-time Block Lists are a very useful security service for clients who wish to cut off email contact with servers that are associated with extensive spamming. 

It is an especially useful service for clients who run their own mail servers, as it gives the server the power to shield itself against highly troublesome IP ranges.

To prevent these servers from interacting with a client’s mail server, a range of IP addresses are supplied to client institutions, who can then block these ranges. This results in the refusal of incoming emails from this range of suspect IPs, ensuring no contact is possible.

HEAnet’s Real-Time Block List Service is available to all clients and is offered in partnership with TrendMicro.com and SpamHaus.org at no extra cost.

SSL website certification is a service, which ensures HEAnet clients’ websites are encrypted and have a base level of security.

The across-the-board roll-out of certification is being driven by an increased awareness of the need for encrypted channels, and the proliferation of authentication and authorisation middleware.

HEAnet’s TCS (Trusted Certificate Service) is providing server certificates valid for three years to our clients at no cost. These certificates are essential for the security of everything from institutional websites, to sub-sites for research groups, student societies, etc.

The server certificates can be used for institution services, including web (HTTPS), email (IMAPS), server authentication and any number of SSL or TLS based services that require trusted certificates.

This service can be expanded to additional areas of certification including document certification, allowing an institution or department to digitally sign, and thus protect, written content.

This can also be expanded to certifying programmes and developed applications, ensuring that ownership and development rights are protected.