Recently in Academia Category

Doug Pearson of REN-ISAC just sent an announcement to the public EDUCAUSE security listserv that MS09-039 is actively being exploited in the higher education arena.

The message confirms earlier speculation by the Internet Storm Center that exploits for the WINS vulnerability are live on the Internet and spreading.

On interesting item in the REN-ISAC bulletin in the explicit warning not to just rely on perimeter firewalls for protection as successful WINS server compromises have been seen originating from inside the organization.

Once again: it is time to patch, block, or disable unused services.

It is almost time to head home and start packing for SOURCE Boston 2009. Together with Adam Dodge, I will be presenting on Wednesday in the business track. The title of our talk is Information Security in Higher Education: Baby steps. We think we have an interesting talk lined up.

What we'll be saying in 100 words is:

Many information security best practices are barely applicable in Higher Education. Colleges are special places of learning, exploration and the open exchange of information. Through intellectual discussion and organized discourse, students and faculty convene to transfer knowledge and insight on esteemed topics.

In this special environment, employees cannot be held accountable, network users are not employees, high-speed networks have few restrictions, and intellectual property is not owned by the organization.

We will discuss some of the challenges that we encountered in the first year after dedicated information security functions were created, and we will share some lessons that we learned.

While the title is fairly specific to higher education, I hope we'll be able to add some interesting insights for those of you who are not in higher ed.

If you are going to be at SOURCE, please drop me a line and we'll try to hook up!

Streaming video traffic coverage of Obama's inauguration flooded North American backbones today. Traffic increases varied wildly across US providers with some seeing an overall 5% increase in backbone traffic and others jumping more than 40%.

Source: The Great Obama Traffic Flood

As a worker in information technology, I am lucky to be close enough to the wire to every now and then peek at the real world to see what is going on.

With today being a fairly special day, I decided to stroll over to our networking group to peek at the traffic monitors, and I was greeted by nice solid green lines. This was the first time in my professional career that I was at the right place at the right time: our external bandwidth was pegged at 100% use, and would not move.

However, since I am teaching at a college again, I have also been starting to feel the itch of doing research, (co)authoring and --hopefully-- publishing papers.

Once disconnected from academia, it is very hard to get back into, and I expect to spending several months reading up and figuring out where the scientific tide has taken the community.

Yet, before I set sail and try to make an serious effort at getting back into doing research, I need to decide what topics are currently worth while investigating, and which appeal to me.

So, having said this, please let me know! Comment to this post, contact me, or send me an email message. I look forward to hearing from you!