University Security

Our Universities are under attack. Networks comprised of heterogeneous hosts with fast Internet connections make universities desirable targets to a wide variety of attackers. Members of university communities are often not concerned with security because they assume that hackers attack systems to obtain confidential information. These academics have not realized that many attacks are instead quests for disk space or processor time and that the information stored on a server is sometimes irrelevant to the attacker. The resulting lack of system security at universities has allowed attackers to quickly make universities the preferred staging areas for distributed denial of service attacks. Decentralized structure and large size make many university networks difficult, but not impossible, to secure. By using a combination of security tools and procedures universities can provide a more secure computing environment than has generally been available.