BLOOMINGTON, Ind.— Case Western Reserve University (CWRU), a private research university in Cleveland, Ohio, has entered into a collaboration with the Indiana University-led OmniSOC to provide 24x7x365 network security monitoring for CWRU’s networks, conduct proactive threat hunting, share threat intelligence cybersecurity research, and workforce development opportunities.
OmniSOC collects cybersecurity data from partners; integrates this data with other threat intelligence, conducts proactive threat hunting; and monitors, triages, and analyzes security events. OmniSOC launched in 2018 as a first-of-its-kind higher education shared, collaborative cyber security operations center (SOC).
Today, OmniSOC is higher education’s only collaborative, multistate security operations center, the only collaborative SOC supporting National Science Foundation research, and the only SOC with a multi-state institutional data-sharing agreement for researchers. Notably, in December 2020, OmniSOC was ranked as the number one higher education threat-hunting team in the country.
We are extremely pleased to welcome Case Western Reserve University into our membership of higher education institutions and research facilities.
Von Welch, executive director of OmniSOC
“We are really excited about the opportunity to partner with the OmniSOC. This will bring us increased visibility into our own network traffic and security alerts, while also improving our awareness of the overall, active higher ed cyber-threat landscape,” said Sue B. Workman, vice president, University Technology and CIO. “The OmniSOC services allow us to expand into real-time, 24x7x365 alerting and response, and provides us with an escalation path for advanced help and advice beyond our own expert staff when we need it.”
Von Welch is executive director of OmniSOC.
“The goal of OmniSOC is to coordinate across member institutions, reducing the time from first awareness of a cybersecurity threat anywhere to mitigation everywhere,” said Welch. “We are extremely pleased to welcome Case Western Reserve University into our membership of higher education institutions and research facilities.”
OmniSOC was founded by members of the Big Ten Academic Alliance to reduce the time from first detection of a security threat to campus mitigation. Indiana University, Northwestern University, Rutgers University, and the University of Nebraska are current Founding Members of the OmniSOC. OmniSOC has since expanded to include several new members in addition to CWRU. OmniSOC also supports the ResearchSOC, the National Science Foundation (NSF) Security Operations Center, supplying cybersecurity for the nation’s greatest research. Major NSF clients include the National Radio Astronomy Observatory, GAGE/UNAVCO, and the Gemini Observatory.
