5/9/2008
Risk assessment doesn't cut much weight in the world of public opinion. In the aftermath of highly publicized violent incidents like those at Virginia Tech and Illinois State, higher education has come under increased scrutiny. In particular, students, their parents, and the general public want to know about the emergency notification procedures that campuses have deployed.
5/5/2008
Wright State University in Dayton, OH, with 17,000 students, has deployed a network access control system from Mirage Networks to manage network-attached devices on campus, including gaming systems.
5/1/2008
Imagine entering the virtual world Second Life to discover that a flu pandemic requires you, a health care professional, to attend to stricken patients lying on the streets around an over-capacity virtual hospital. When you report in to collect your virtual uniform, you're told what your responsibilities will be during the disaster and to whom you'll report.
5/1/2008
Tel-Aviv University (TAU) and security company Check Point Software Technologies have announced a partnership to establish an information security research institute. The institute, under the auspices of the School of Computer Science at TAU, will be managed by a joint board, with representatives and financing from both the vendor and the university. The set-up investment is estimated at about $1 million.
5/1/2008
Microsoft is claiming that an injection attack vulnerability discovered late last week and made public this week related to the popular business database application SQL, is not the company's fault but may lie with lax Web developers.
4/30/2008
Vizioncore Inc. this week announced it has launched vCharter Pro, a monitoring tool designed for enterprise virtualization deployments running on VMware's ESX Server.
4/25/2008
Last week, hundreds of executives at some of America's most well-known companies received e-mails that they probably didn't want to get--even if those messages weren't a hoax.
4/25/2008
The University of Nottingham has deployed a Web security appliance from Finjan to protect its two primary networks, one with 12,000 university-owned computers used for teaching, research, and administration and the other supporting 8,000 student-owned PCs.
4/24/2008
Driven by compliance and public confidence issues, information security is expected to expand dramatically over the next few years, according to new research released by Frost & Sullivan and (ISC)². Worldwide, the number of information security professionals will grow from 1.66 million in 2007 to about 2.7 million in 2012, experiencing a compound annual growth rate of 10 percent.
4/24/2008
The State University of New York (SUNY) at Brockport has learned reported that a laptop belonging to an employee at SunGard Higher Education, a software company that provides IT services to the university system, was reported stolen March 13. The school learned about the theft April 14 and received copies of the compromised files April 17.
4/23/2008
The University of Wyoming has selected Rave Alert as its platform for sending emergency notifications to its campus community. Before buying the solution, the school did two tests of service. According to a statement by the company, in the second campus-wide test, 7,000 students, faculty and staff members received a text message on their cell phones. Of the students polled, nine out of 10 reported receiving the text messages within one minute; the longest wait was up to four minutes.
4/22/2008
Texas A&M University looked to defend its National Champions title against five teams at the National Collegiate Cyber Defense Competition (NCCDC) this weekend but lost out to Baker College of Flint, MI. The third-annual NCCDC was hosted by the University of Texas at San Antonio's Center for Infrastructure Assurance and Security (CIAS), a cyber security education and research center.
4/22/2008
A group of publishers has filed suit in federal court to stop what it calls "widespread copyright infringement" at Georgia State University (GSU). The complaint, filed by Oxford University Press, Cambridge University Press, and SAGE Publications and supported by the Association of American Publishers (AAP), charges that GSU administrators are violating the law by systematically enabling professors to provide students with digital copies of copyrighted course readings without publisher authorization.
4/22/2008
Security personnel in Redmond are investigating a newly reported zero-day bug vulnerability in Microsoft operating systems and server systems. The bug, disclosed Thursday by Bill Sisk, security response communications manager for Microsoft, allows escalation of privilege to occur for authenticated users under specific conditions.
4/21/2008
How secure is your virtual environment? Recent US-CERT Cyber Security Bulletins list several vulnerabilities for versions of software from VMware that allow attackers to cause denial of service attacks, generate buffer overflows, expose password logging and gain unauthorized privileges that can be used to hijack processes. The exposures have been addressed in patches by the company, but concern has been growing that virtual machines may get less security-related attention from IT staff than physical boxes.
4/18/2008
Microsoft Thursday described its new platform to help developers more easily create mobile applications that make use of radiofrequency identification (RFID) technology. The company unveiled BizTalk RFID Mobile, a solution designed to work with Microsoft BizTalk Server 2006 R2 and other Microsoft products.
4/17/2008
The University of Miami reported Thursday that computer back-up tapes containing personal information from some 2.1 million patients were stolen from a third-party storage facility in March. The university said it's confident that the information on those tapes is inaccessible to the thieves but is notifying patients anyway.
4/17/2008
Omnilert, which sells the e2Campus emergency notification system, said it has sold its services to several Louisiana colleges and universities in recent months. The company also recently posted a discount pricing structure to the Louisiana state contract system, which allows schools in the contract system to purchase the service without going through a bid process.
4/15/2008
The University of Missouri (MU) has teamed with IBM to arm its students with the latest information technology (IT) security and compliance training. This training will help MU students acquire the expertise required to help reduce the risk of financial losses caused through non-compliance.
4/14/2008
In the world if IT security, it's a well known secret that end users in Windows processing environments put themselves at risk whenever they check their MySpace and Facebook pages, or shop for plane tickets, computers and other goods and services--all while at the workplace.
4/14/2008
Art Coviello kicked off RSA Conference 2008, his company's namesake information security conference, April 8 in San Francisco with a warning.
4/14/2008
A beta release of Windows Live OneCare 2.5, Microsoft's automated security suite for home users and small businesses, is available for testing from the Microsoft Connect Web site. Microsoft stated through its blog that there is little apparent difference between the beta and standard versions.
4/11/2008
Dartmouth's Institute for Information Infrastructure (I3P) recently transferred control of its 7,000-resource cyber security library to the Naval Postgraduate School (NPS) Center for Homeland Defense and Security in Monterey, CA.
4/11/2008
The Department of Homeland Security has issued the regulations that will govern the Real ID Act that sets standards for drivers' licenses across the country. How will it impact you and your campus?
4/10/2008
A breach of an ERP system at Antioch University forced the school to send letters out to more than 60,000 students, former students and staff members informing them that they could become victim to identity theft. The problems surfaced on February 13, 2008, when an anti-virus program detected a virus on one of Antioch's computers. Forensic software investigators hired by the university to examine its systems found that an unauthorized intruder had gained access to one of the computers on three occasions during 2007 and that an IRC bot had been installed.