Bill MacKenty

Technology strengthens, deepens, and broadens our learning...

Educational Network Security - part 1

Having spent the majority of my professional life in an OS X environment, moving to a Windows-based school was quite an adjustment. However, over the last few months, I have been managing with the overall, basic functionality of Windows.  It certainly doesn’t have the same ease of use; and I note the included windows software is light-years behind what is available for OS X.

So last Friday we noticed the school network was sluggish, and then about noon, we had many faculty members reporting pop-ups on their computers.  About 30 or 40 minutes later, we had a call from the college, telling us a virus was port scanning everything in site. We have a pretty standard Windows layout - ghosted machines, anti-virus corporate edition with updated definition files, and we use a fortress-like tool to secure our labs. We have a competent network administrator, and a strong IT team.

Still, though, the sad thing is only one computer on a network needs to be unsecured for the entire system to fall like dominos. It is, actually, a rather classic manifestation of malicious software infestation.

We disabled all incoming and outgoing traffic to our school, and started the painful and arduous process for reissuing passwords and scanning every single machine in the school. Some machines will need to be re-ghosted, and anything saved locally will be erased.

The downtime looks to be moderate (a few hours if we are lucky), but it is a massive pain the neck. Fortunately, it gives me a few hours to write this series of articles about educational network security. I’ve been meaning to do this for a while.