AirMagnet Inc. on Monday released a new version of its WLAN security solution, which now is capable of detecting, tracing and blocking rogue access points in real time to help protect the integrity of corporate wireless networks.
AirMagnet Distributed 4.0 comprises a set of remote sensors throughout the
customer’s network, along with a central server. The sensors perform virtually all of the analysis of the WLAN traffic they find, preventing unnecessary traffic on the
corporate network. Other wireless security systems use the sensors simply as
collectors that suck up packets and then send them across the wired network to a back-end server for analysis. AirMagnet’s sensors send only small amounts of trend and alarm data to the central server.
The biggest addition to the new version is the inclusion of rogue AP blocking.
Using a variety of identifying characteristics, including MAC address, SSID and the name of the AP’s manufacturer, AirMagnet Distributed is able to determine which APs are authorized to be on the network. When a rogue device is found, the software can trace the AP’s location through the wired network and block it or even disable it.