Ross Schneider
2-18-05
BA 3200
Colleges and Internet Attacks
In The Chronicle, an article titled “The Growing Vulnerability of Campus Networks” by Florence Olsen, was written March 15, 2002, talking about the increase of Internet attacks on college campuses. With students and faculty not totally aware of what goes on in their computer, they are in danger of viruses and worms that could do major damage to the campus network. I would advise any school, such as Michigan Tech, to work on educating its students and faculty on ways to keep hackers and Trojan horses out of their computers, and how to handle situations where they do get viruses and worms, either by getting a hold of their network administrator or running a program that would remove the virus itself. With people more educated on how to handle these kinds of situations, viruses and hackers can be kept out of the network and held at bay.
The computer use policy at Michigan Tech is pretty clear about what can and can’t be done with the university’s resources. It protects itself from lawsuits that other people would act on. Basically, the school will take responsibility if good things happen, but will leave the student “out to dry” if they cause trouble. But, if the network isn’t secure, and the student’s computer is hacked and used for other things, it would probably be tracked back to the student, and not to the hacker, in which the student would be in big trouble for something he/she didn’t do. In essence, it’s really the school’s fault for not having a strong enough firewall, unless the school says that the students are to keep their own firewall.
Legal implications of the computer use policy are that the school has no part in damage that is done to your computer, and that any data you have on the network is public data, except e-mail and certain hard drives, and you should expect that all data is public. This policy should help users know that they have certain rights for using the computer labs and to be aware of what could happen.
Ethical implications of the policy are not as up to par as they could be. The policy doesn’t sound user friendly, it’s more to protect Tech from problems that might happen. The policy doesn’t say anything about protecting the users from outside attacks, but even says that they will be watched by other users to “perform routine maintenance, prevent damage to systems, ensure compliance with University procedures, rules, or regulations or ensure compliance with state and federal regulations and laws.”
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