One of the annoyances that we have is wireless cards on our corporate computers that are looking for any access point named starbucks (no encryption) while connected to our domain. Anyone with a powerful antenna could park outside, set call their access point starbucks and the computers that are looking for starbucks would connect to that evil rogue access point. Personal firewalls should still protect, but it just looks bad.
So we've been looking for ways to disable wireless cards while the laptop is connected to our network. We went through a thing a few years ago with devcon. Unfortunately a VP said we couldn't disable wireless cards on computers connected to our domain because it would inconvenience the user.
We just now ran accross a setting in the dell truemobile card that will do what we want "Disable Upon Wired Connect". And I'm finding articles dated 2002 with this info. I picking the wrong search term leads to disappointment.
I'm still left with a problem. I hear the path to this value in the registry is dynamic based upon how many network interfaces you have. That will make it hard to change. The second problem is about half of our network cards are Intel and I dont know of a similar setting in those cards.
Use Sygate Enterprise protection Agent. Can check rules before a machine gets access to the LAN. One of them could be that he disables WiFi if connected on the LAN.
Blue Coat does address zero-day. Kaspersky AV has very strong heuristics to find new and variant attacks. Look at www.av-comparitives.org for their "lookback" tests, where last month's Kaspersky finds this month's viruses. Also, Kaspersky AV is automatically updated every 15 minutes or so, far more often than Trend, McAfee of Symantec.
I suspect this comment was intended for the Bluecoat post.
I agree with you about Kaspersky's update times and what they detect. You've made me feel a bit better about this.
Check out Wireless AutoSwitch it does what you want. It disables the wireless card when a LAN cable is plugged in and enables the wireless card when the LAN cable is disconnected.
http://www.wirelessautoswitch.com
I'm worried about this statement in the manual "You have to use Windows XP's wireless zero configuration (XP's built in wireless
network connection program) to manage the card. If for instance you have a Linksys
wireless card and are using the Linksys utility to manage wireless connections the card
may not get disabled by Wireless AutoSwitch."
That is an issue for us.
A no cost utility can be downloaded from pages below.
http://www.wlanbook.com/disable-wireless-connected-lan-xp-vista/
http://www.wlanbook.com/bridgechecker/
thanks, looks interesting.