Web security gateway company Mi5 Networks (mi5networks.com) announced Wednesday that its Webgate appliances will block spyware, trojans, viruses and quarantine botnet hijacked machines at one of America's oldest colleges, founded in 1742.

"Given the amount of web traffic that flows through our campus network, filtering for malware using a proxy-based system was significantly slowing down the user experience for our students and faculty," Moravian College networking manager and network engineer James Beers said in a statement. "The Mi5 Webgate appliance has eliminated this network bottleneck and dramatically reduced the amount of malware we see."
 
Since enlisting Mi5, malware infections are reportedly down by 60 to 70 percent, noting that although public machines are managed by the college's IT staff, they cannot control student machines. As result, malware infections and botnets are common, making the college environment a potential malware minefield.

"Protecting and maintaining the hygiene of a college network is one of the most challenging and labor intensive assignments in the IT security industry," Mi5 CEO Doug Camplejohn said in a statement. "Since removing malware is an endless battle on campus networks, our automated cleanup capability is especially attractive to colleges which lack the IT staff to manually clean and fix all problems."

Earlier this week, Emory University (emory.edu) signed a 10-year deal with colocation facility AtlantaNAP (atlantanap.com/about.php) to provide real-time data backup for the university and hospital systems housed in AtlantaNAP's new data center expansion area.