medieval-religion: Scholarly discussions of medieval religion and culture
Universities vary greatly in their size, in their complexity, and in the adequacy of their funding for computer security vis-a-vis their size and their complexity. That being so, the extent to which one can make valid generalizations about universities' greater or lesser susceptibility as a class to theft of passwords as opposed to unspecified others seems severely limited. It is very probably true, for example, that universities are more susceptible to such theft than are, say, the intelligence agencies of nation states. But it is very probably not true that universities are more susceptible to such theft than are, say, many other sorts of agencies of nation states. Or than many businesses that don't devote the resources necessary to maintain security in an environment where new vulnerabilities are, alas, a fact of life.
My university is a rather large one, with about 40,000 FTEs (Full Time Equivalents, a measure of student registration), some 2000 faculty members and at least as many non-faculty degreed professionals working as researchers, instructors, or specialty personnel in a great variety of fields. It has multiple computer systems (a university that has but one system would be of a different order of magnitude), not all of which are linked to each other, and many, many servers. A lot of money (including paying for personnel time) is spent on security and data theft, while it does occur, is -- in my experience, at least -- extremely rare. My e-mail address is spoofed from time to time but (knock on wood) I've never had my passwords stolen. Other universities probably do a better job, others a worse one.
Best,
John Dillon
PS: My university's centralized e-mail spam catcher recognized the offending mail right away as spam and put it directly in my spam folder with the following endorsement: "Spam Status: The spam scanner labeled this message as Spam (Highest)".
On Tuesday, December 2, 2008, at 10:39 pm, George Hoelzeman wrote:
> Does this happen more with people at universities using institutional
> e-mail addresses?
>
> I ask because one of my brothers is a PhD in a local university. One
> night he was working late and noticed that someone else logged onto
> the system.
> Since he was the only person in the building, he did a bit of
> detective work and managed to trace the intruder back to Singapore
> before the trail
> disappeared. Whoever it was already had the universitys codes and
> passwords and was pillaging the internal records for more. Needless
> to say, my
> brother dealt with them aggressively.
>
> Makes me wonder if schools might be more suceptable than others.
>
> George the Less
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