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Data Security
Protecting the Oblivious
4/1/2008
College and university technology users have been notoriously blind to their campuses' struggles to protect data from lurking threats. Now, with clever new security measures and campus community awareness initiatives, all that is changing.
When it comes to dealing with cyber attacks, there's no silver bullet. Ironically, however, college educators are already accustomed to wielding what may be the best weapon of all-education. Assaulted by the myriad species of spam, worms, Trojan horses, spyware, viruses, and other diseases that so easily infect and sometimes devastate campus networks, administrators are turning to education as a first line of defense. Many campuses are making vigorous efforts to thoroughly inform students and faculty about the threats their information systems face. Coupled with the installation of multilayered security applications, this approach is proving effective, and IT administrators point to it as a dependable way to combat cyber attacks they believe will only increase in scale and sophistication. At the same time, educators are walking a tightrope between intrusive system monitoring and maintaining the traditional freedom of an academic environment.
Increasingly, the balance may be tipping in favor of intrusion. Universities simply don't make the grade when it comes to electronic data protection, according to a recent study conducted by technology services provider CDW-G. The survey of 151 IT directors and managers from higher education institutions of various sizes reveals that 43 percent of the respondents experienced data loss or theft in 2007, a 10 percent jump over the previous year. For the second year in a row, respondents cited lack of student and faculty awareness of security threats as one of the top reasons for not having made headway against cyber attacks (see "Why So Oblivious?").
Paul Zindell, a security specialist for CDW-G, believes that the unrestricted atmosphere of universities makes them particularly vulnerable to data theft. "Higher ed environments are pretty open," he says. "People want freedom of speech, open access to wireless and the web, and a lot of students use peer-to-peer applications. This is a threat to security and also sucks up a lot of bandwidth."
In Zindell's view, a robust solution consists of a layered approach that includes a strong antivirus application, gateway spam filter, firewall, secure wireless network, encryption, and controlled access to the internal network. Yet, even institutions with these layer features in place, he says, are subject to breaches by both internal and external hackers. "A lot of colleges tend to fix their systems after something bad happens," he explains. "The problem then becomes big news in the press. But colleges need to be proactive in their approach to security."
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