What is Juniper/Network Connect and why is it suddenly on my mac?

I'm only slightly mac literate, despite having had a MacBook for four years, and could use some help with this (I turn to the mac forums regularly but can't find anything on this). Also, this question might be kind of stupid - but I am worried about something that seems to have suddenly appeared on my mac:
I noticed this evening that I have a new Firefox Plugin called "Juniper Networks Safari Extensions 20169." I have no idea what it is and it wasn't there two weeks ago. I searched online for info and have deduced that Juniper Networks provides software to facilitate networking (VPNs?) for remote users. I think. I have no idea why or who I would be networking with - I use my macbook at home on our home wireless network, and in the public library and at my university - and I haven't installed or upgraded anything to do with these networks (that I know of) in the last few weeks. Additionally, I searched Juniper Networks on my mac and found a program called "Network Connect," which I have never seen before.
Can anyone provide me with more info about these programs? I am using Mac OS 10.6, Processor: 2 Ghz Intel Core 2 Duo. I hope that's enough info but let me know if I can provide any other details. Thanks.

Hi,

we use this on our corporate network, it is not beyond the realms of possibility that this is from your university. Do you have to login to the Uni network (for anything?).

It does allow you to create secure tunnels into the corporate (or academic) network. So for example we use it to allow our home-workers to login to our network for email and the intranet etc. Now the tunnel is set to only send what we define as 'interesting traffic' over to us. We don't want to have to check everything that comes in and out of a home users personal computer so the Juniper stuff looks at traffic we define as being of interest to us (i.e. emails or intranet or browsing your home drive etc). Any traffic that isn't 'interesting' i.e. the general internet stuff, youtube, your personal email etc, then don't let it in the tunnel, send it via the users normal internet connection, we don't care about it and we don't want the router trying to encrypt your personal email traffic, it is just a waste of resources on our router.

Obviously, from my point of view I don't have a problem with the Juniper stuff, it is there for a good reason and it does a fairly good job. Hopefully it s just something that your uni has dumped onto your mac. If it is, and you don't remember installing it, then you might find that your normal everyday account is a local admin on your mac, you might want to consider creating a new admin account and then lowering the privileges on your own account (make sure you create the admin account FIRST...) that way nothing can be installed without you being asked for an admin name and password.