Because the UTSA wired network is a wide open ethenet LAN, it is 
succeptible to common ethernet attacks. The Adress Resol

Ethernet networks were originally desinged without concern for security 

One of the most exploited properties of ethernet networks is the use of 
the Adress Reolution Protocol, or ARP. To communicate over an ethernet 
LAN devices must have two adresses, an IP adress that is usually 
dynamically assigned by the router, and a MAC address that is hard-wired 
into the devices network interface card. To send data, every device must 
know the IP address and MAC adress for the device they wish to 
communicate with. The Adress Resolution Protocol ties those two adresses 
together by sending out ARP requests and recieving replies to build a 
table that matches IP and MAC adress. However, ARP has a problem that is 
incurable - it has no means for authentication. It will blindly accept 
whatever reply it is given, even if no request was sent. Attackers have 
leveraged ARP to create various exploits.

By forging ARP replies it is simple for an attacker to edit a victim 
computer's ARP table to believe that the attacker's MAC address is 
actually that of the router's. The attacker can also edit the router's 
table so that it will believe that the attacker is actually the victim's 
computer. The attacker can then forward all traffic from the router to 
the victim and back. This is known as a man in the middle attack, and 
has been around nearly as long as there have been ethernet networks. 

In the past SSL encryption has provided protection from man in the 
middle attacks. The whole point of SSL is that someone can view all 
traffic on a network and because SSL uses unbreakable public key 
encryption, that observer still cannot read captured traffic. However, 
at the 2009 Black Hat security conference an independant hacker named 
Moxie Marlinspike released a python script called SSLstrip, a tool that, 
when run on a computer that is configured as a man in the middle, will 
intercept SSL conections and authenticate itself to the remote server. 
The attacker's computer will then dynamically strip out SSL protected 
parts of the website and forward them to the victim computer. The victim 
will see the exact same website that they would normally see, with one 
exception - when they looked at the address bar, they would see an 
HTTP:// instead of HTTPS://, which an unsophisticaed might not notice or 
understand. The user could then enter login information for their email 
or financial provider which would be transmitted in the clear to the man 
in the middle, who would then relay that information through the SSL 
connection they had established on behalf of the victim.

Using this method, it would be easy to capture the login information for 
any student who is using a workstation that is wired ethernet connection 
at UTSA.

Though ethernet was originally designed without any way of limiting 
access, some methods have been developed to secure ethernet networks. 
The most commonly deployed today is 802.1x, which requires devices to 
authenticate at the data link layer. On a network that useses 
802.1x, before devices can send or recieve any other traffic, they must 
first have their MAC address approved.