By participating in MANRS, UOG joins a community of security-minded organizations committed to making the global routing infrastructure more robust and secure.

Insecure routing, such as IP spoofing and network hijacking, are among the most common vectors of malicious threats to networks. Sometimes, routing errors can lead to taking entire countries and service platforms, like Google, offline.

In early November 2023, the Office of Information Technology completed and submitted its application to the MANRS program after completing a series of objectives that have been in progress for the past year. To become eligible to apply, the action items listed on the MANRS website are Filtering, Anti-spoofing, coordination, and Global information. UOG received its confirmation for verified compliance in two days as a published participant of MANRS: https://www.manrs.org/participant/5406/

This means the Internet society confirms that UOG has taken the necessary steps to secure its network from malicious intent and errors at the global network level. 

UOG's network security posture is checked and verified by MANRS regularly to ensure that compliance is maintained. UOG also operates MARIIX, the Mariana Islands Internet Exchange, and is looking to get this network certified as MANRS-compliant as well. MARIIX is a project that aims to improve network connectivity for the region by lowering latency and creating resiliencies and opportunities for shared content to be better accessible by the regional community.

“UOG continues to improve its cybersecurity posture with a MANRS-compliant network. One of our goals is to be safe Internet participants by taking part in this global initiative to help reduce the most common routing threats of the Internet,” said UOG Chief Information Officer Vincent Dela Cruz.

The University of Guam extends its thanks to the Network Startup Resource Center (NSRC) for assisting the UOG Office of IT team in achieving the goal.