Colleges and universities are part-time homes to more than 16 million people, and employ over 1.5 million more. Most of them utilize the networks set up by the college\u2019s bevy of IT administrators. If you consider that most people have difficulty keeping viruses and other malware off of their personal computers, opening up networks that facilitate this kind of user demand can be tricky. Today, we ask: can a campus\u2019 network every truly be secure?<\/p>\n
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The first Internet was born on college campuses. It was built by intellectuals, for academics, without the massive list of considerations that now accompany software development. It spread quickly, of course, and somewhere, pretty early on, it was decided that by being able to support commerce, the Internet could become one of the west\u2019s greatest inventions.<\/p>\n
This came to fruition in 1984 when the first catalogue was launched on the Internet. This was followed by the first e-store (at books.com) in 1992, and the first software to be sold online (Ipswitch IMail Server) in 1994. Amazon and eBay launched the following year and the Internet has never been the same.<\/p>\n
By then, the academic uses for the Internet had multiplied, as well. By the time Amazon launched, many colleges and universities were offering students access to the Internet as an important part of their continuing education. Boy, was it ever.<\/p>\n
Today, you\u2019ll be hard pressed to find a classroom (outside of the poorest school districts in the country) where every classroom isn\u2019t Internet-ready.<\/p>\n
This stands true in university and college circles, as well. Campuses today are almost completely connected. You\u2019ll be hard pressed to find a place on a modern campus that, as long as you have security credentials to do so, you can\u2019t gain access to an Internet connection. In a lot of ways, it is the demand for access that makes network security a major pain point for the modern college. Firstly, having to protect computing networks from a continuously variable amount of mobile devices is difficult. Secondly, the same attacks that plague businesses, are also hindering IT administrator efforts at colleges.<\/p>\n
Colleges themselves aren\u2019t doing anyone any favors. According to a 2018 report, none of the top 10 computer science degrees in the United States require a cybersecurity course to graduate. Of the top 50 computer science programs listed by Business Insider only three require some type of cybersecurity course. Moreover, only one school out of 122 reviewed by Business Insider requires the completion of three or more cybersecurity courses, the University of Alabama. Regardless of the metric, it\u2019s clear that learning cybersecurity is not a priority for any school.<\/p>\n
The short answer is no. That\u2019s why it’s so important to get people thinking about cybersecurity any way they can. No industry can afford to have the skills gap between people that hack and the people looking to stop them grow any wider. This is why, no matter what you do (or plan on doing) for a living it\u2019s important to understand what your responsibilities are and how to get them into a place that can help your organization ward off these threats from outside (and sometimes inside) your network.<\/p>\n