Case Study: Stanford University detects and halts a hacker intrusion with Tableau Software

Stanford University - Customer Case Study

Stanford University’s Computer Graphics Lab was alerted in July 2004 to a rogue FTP server in the stanford.edu domain that was generating very high off‑campus traffic. Investigators needed a tool to analyze Cisco NetFlow records—time‑stamped summaries of source/destination IPs, ports, protocols, and byte counts—and required Microsoft SQL Server support, the ability to sift through millions of records quickly, and to manipulate and display many data dimensions simultaneously.

Stanford chose Tableau Professional. Tableau’s visual analysis, advanced filtering and rapid ad hoc querying let the team pivot through millions of flows, reduce the data to understandable views, and trace the malicious activity to its source—supporting network forensics that led to identification and arrest of the intruder.

Stanford University

John Gerth

Manager, Computer Graphics Lab