Case Study: Hillsborough Community College achieves agentless visibility and dramatic downtime reduction with ForeScout CounterACT

ForeScout Scores High Marks for Visibility, Policy-Based Control and Third-Party Integration

Hillsborough Community College (HCC), one of Florida’s largest higher-education institutions serving over 47,000 students across five campuses, faced growing cybersecurity challenges from heavy BYOD use and thousands of simultaneous wireless connections. IT was “totally blind” to devices on the network, needed to enforce separate student/employee domains, automate endpoint remediation, accelerate incident response, and cut the time and cost of reimaging infected systems.

HCC deployed Forescout CounterACT (agentless visibility with SecureConnector and a FireEye integration) to classify devices, enforce VLAN- and policy-based access, and automate remediation. The solution enabled continuous monitoring and orchestrated threat containment (stopping CryptoLocker), reduced reimaging from 20–25 systems/month to ~1.5, cut monthly restoration hours from ~300 to under 18, minimized data loss and user impact, and improved overall network control.

Hillsborough Community College

Kenneth Compres

Senior Network Security and Integration Engineer