Protecting the Oblivious

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Data Security

Protecting the Oblivious

4/1/2008

By Rama Ramaswami

Why So Oblivious?

LAST OCTOBER, CDW-G released its third annual Higher Education IT Security Report Card , a national survey of 151 higher education IT directors and managers (from a variety of postsecondary institutions) looking at the state of campus IT security.

And the results aren't good: Fifty-eight percent of respondents reported IT security breaches over the last 12 months; in fact, the survey found that data loss or theft (including the loss of staff or student personal information) increased 10 percent between 2006 and 2007. Who's to blame? Respondents not only cited inadequate funding as a barrier to IT security, but also complained of a lack of support from faculty and students. Unhappily, students' flat-out disregard of security rules and policies (more than a simple lack of awareness) was noted by respondents as the biggest barrier to IT security.

On the faculty side, however, lack of awareness was considered the greatest barrier to security technology implementation, as well as the expectation that exceptions would be made for individuals.

Two universities that have had considerable success with e-mail appliances are Penn State and Georgia Southern University. At Penn State, the Intercollegiate Athletics department, which has more than 300 e-mail users, used an innovative technique to filter spam: It isolated itself from the university's centralized IT system and installed its own open source appliance. That's because Phil Mansfield, systems administrator for the department, discovered that the university's in-house anti-spam software, installed directly on the Microsoft Outlook e-mail server, shut down antivirus functions completely when there were problems with the server. This affected e-mail performance for the entire athletics group.

"I believe that threats come from a wide variety of sources, but e-mail is the main vector," says Mansfield. "It's the easiest to attack and is always allowed through the firewall. To supplement the existing antivirus software already installed, we searched out a front-end gateway SMTP solution. We were looking for a solution that would provide greater spam filtration as well as free up the workload of the back-end provider."

Mansfield opted for