5 universities of Big Ten Academic Alliance announce launch of OmniSOC cyber security operations center

March 22, 2018 -- Indiana University, Northwestern University, Purdue University, Rutgers University and the University of Nebraska-Lincoln have announced the launch and activation of OmniSOC, a specialized, sector-based cyber security operations center, or SOC, that provides actionable cyber intelligence to its members.

OmniSOC is a pioneering initiative of these Big Ten Academic Alliance universities with a goal to help higher education institutions reduce the time from first awareness of a cybersecurity threat anywhere to mitigation everywhere for members.

"With tens of thousands of students, faculty and staff, university campuses are really like small cities, with sensitive data and powerful computing systems that are coveted by cyber criminals," said Tom Davis, OmniSOC founding executive director and chief information security officer. "Protecting hundreds of thousands of devices and critical data requires expertise, systems, policies and rapid response when new vulnerabilities become known. While campus-by-campus approaches are essential, they are not sufficient for the sophistication of modern cyber risks. The OmniSOC enhances the work of local security professionals to provide greater real-time, sophisticated threat detection, analysis and action for our members."

OmniSOC is based at Indiana University and leverages two decades of experience and capabilities from GlobalNOC, the 24/7 Global Research Network Operations Center that provides services to government, research and education networks across the nation. Using real-time security information data feeds from each member campus, as well as governmental and corporate security subscriptions, OmniSOC identifies suspicious and malicious activity requiring mitigation and provides incident response through human analysis and machine learning.

In addition to GlobalNOC, OmniSOC works in close coordination with the federally chartered Research and Education Networking Information Sharing and Analysis Center at IU. Established in 2003, REN-ISAC's primary mission is to aid and promote cybersecurity protection, response and information sharing among its 580 members within the research and higher education communities.

OmniSOC has chosen the Elastic Stack as its security analytics platform. The Elastic Stack is used to ingest, correlate and analyze vast quantities of information to detect and hunt for cyber threats to member systems.