Click here to receive your FREE subscription to Campus Technology
on Campus
Article
8 Spots for Tightening Security
on Campus
1/21/2004
"There are good tools out there, but they're very expensive."
The problem peaked in September at the law school, when a widely spread virus was attacking Microsoft operating systems and unsuspecting students returned to campus with infected laptops. Now, the problem is down to three or four laptops a week, she says.
Requiring students to register their network cards in order to get access outside the campus on the university's network helps, she says - students can then be tracked down through a database and contacted if necessary through their network IDs.
6. Set and Enforce Testing Standards
As you continue to develop, integrate, and enforce working security policies for your organization, cooperation and communication among various groups on campus are key. Among other things, this becomes important in setting and enforcing testing standards for how new software is deployed. In examining how an SQL server was compromised, a case study from the University of Memphis highlights the importance of policies for making sure that testing is conducted in keeping with agreed-upon security policies. As the authors of the case study conclude in one of their findings after the security breach was closed, agreeing on what tests are required before deployment into the production environment is paramount:
"Equilibrium between experimentation and security standards must be established. It may not be appropriate to deploy an application into a production environment unless appropriate security testing has been performed… Service administrators must understand the importance of securing, and keeping secure, the production environments upon which services depend."
7. Review Data Retention Policies
With the enactment of the USA Patriot Act in 2001 ("Uniting and Strengthening America by Providing Appropriate Tools Required to Intercept and Obstruct Terrorism Act of 2001"), data retention has become a security hot spot.
Setting record-retention policies, never easy, has become even more difficult. According to Fred Beshears, senior strategist at Educational Technology Services at the University of California-Berkeley, FERPA, an older government mandate to protect student records, conflicts with the Patriot Act, which allows for governmental access to student records in some cases. In short, Beshears says, "You get into all these gnarly problems on [privacy]."
For an in-depth discussion of the conflicts of privacy and security on today's campus, and some insights into the issue, read the in-depth discussion by Kent Wada, information technology security and policy coordinator at the University of California-Los Angeles.
Among other things, Wada notes that in the face of the Patriot Act and other legislation, security concerns regarding e-mail become more difficult than ever and probably need to be reviewed and reassessed. "The balancing act is to keep relevant data only as long as it is legitimately needed, and no longer, lest it become a liability."
Recommended Reading
- Fixed-Mobile Convergence: Dartmouth Beefs Up Cell Coverage, Cuts Costs
Problems with cell phone coverage aren't uncommon on college campuses. There are two main reasons: The beefy structure of historic buildings can block cellular reception within walls, and, on more remote campuses outside cities, signal coverage can be light.
- Thompson Rivers U Deploys Unified Digital Campus for ERP
Thompson Rivers University (TRU) in British Columbia has selected SunGard Higher Education's Banner Unified Digital Campus (UDC) to integrate its ERP systems.
- DV Kitchen Web Video Publishing System Released
DVcreators.net has released DV Kitchen, a new video encoding and publishing application for Mac OS X designed specifically for creating materials to be posted on the Web.
- NEC Debuts 4 Education Projectors
NEC this week debuted four new projectors targeted toward education applications, along with a new MultiSync LCD display. The new NP-series projectors are entry-level models started at $899 but are designed to provide high light output, support for closed captioning, and built-in networking capabilities.
- Security Researchers Uncover Spring Framework Vulnerability
Software frameworks are enjoying enormous popularity these days among a range of developers. It's popularity well earned; frameworks provide powerful tools for building more flexible and less error-prone applications. They generally enhance developer productivity with out-of-the-box functionality. And they can free developers to focus on features instead of common coding tasks.
- 3PAR Server Arrays Integrate Fat-to-Thin Processing
Utility storage provider 3PAR has announced the release of the 3PAR InServ T400 and T800 Storage Servers. The new hardware is built on the company's third-generation InSpire architecture, featuring the 3PAR Gen3 ASIC with integrated fat-to-thin processing.
