by Mac Pohanka
The past six months have seen a rise in hacking at major universities and colleges, according to Bill Francis, Director of Information Technology Services, causing ITS to make changes to campus technology.
Francis said that growth in the number of documents and the amount of information protected by our passwords necessitated a change.
ITS decided a change was necessary because the six-letter passwords of the past 20 years were long outdated and could be cracked easily. New passwords are required to be at least eight digits long and must include both letters and numbers. This way, according to Francis, passwords become more complex and difficult to hack.
The passwords also expire after approximately 190 days, rather than once a year as they had previously. Francis said that the new password policy would increase security for student transcripts, emails and other important information protected under the campus network.
The change in passwords is part of a larger attempt to make all campus technology more secure. According to a letter Francis posted on the ITS website, ITS has also been updating hardware and software for servers and other major components of the school network in addition to changing the password policy.
The change in policy, originally considered last spring, took effect on April 7.
Initially, there were some problems. Some students using email clients experienced problems because of automatic sign in and automatic mail checking systems. These mail clients did not recognize the need for password changes and after several login attempts the students accounts were locked out. Francis said nearly all difficulties have subsided.
With this change to the password policy, ITS has also added a spam filtering server to the network. Before December the Grinnell College network had no spam filtering service, but now users have the option of turning on a central filter.
“The spam filter is a convenience right now, but eventually it will be a necessity,” said Francis. “Right now, about two-thirds of the mail that comes into Grinnell College is spam.”
Grinnell College receives about 30,000 messages daily, and 10,000 of those are addressed to bogus addresses or to people who are not hear. The new service does not accept messages to non-existent email addresses.
Francis said that the filter was not automatically turned on for everyone. The filter can be set to different levels, allowing varying types of email to be filtered out. Francis directed those interested in setting up a spam filter to the ITS website.
A related change is also under way with Webmail, the college’s old email program. According to Francis, every few years the email exchange program is updated. However, no company owns or updates Webmail anymore, making it incompatible with the most recent exchange update in 2001. At that point, in order to continue to use Webmail, ITS staff had to alter the program.
Francis said that in July when the exchange is updated again Webmail may be “unsalvageable.” He added that ITS is currently looking into different email programs which may allow students to keep the Webmail interface with updated capabilities and usage but “that is not definite.”
The new anti-virus protection that ITS adopted in the fall receives updates at least once a day. These ‘pattern files,’ drawn up by Trend Micro, automatically load onto computers’ anti-virus protection program.
Last Friday afternoon, a pattern file that wasn’t written or tested was sent. Computers that were on would not open applications, but computers that were off would not receive anything. While it looked like a virus at first, ITS soon discovered the problem and was able to fix computers that had been affected by the pattern file.
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