In his article in the Chronicle of Philanthropy titled “Top 10 Threats to Computer Systems Include Professors and Students,” Jeffrey Young says
Today a growing number of network bad guys are professional criminals, and they’re looking to steal real money. They don’t just want to post an embarrassing note on your college’s home page. They want to nab the identities of students and professors to go on shopping sprees with forged credit cards. With the global economy getting lousier, officials predict that even more hackers will get into the act in search of easy cash.
Increasingly, the weakest part of a network is the users, who carelessly give out their passwords or leave important information for the taking.
(No surprise there). He then lists the following threats:
#10: Spammers (“attackers use college networks to help them send more spam”).
#9: Cellphones (“harder to secure than laptops or desktops”).
#8: Phishers (“scammers pretend to be college network officials asking recipients for their network ID’s and passwords”).
#7: Social Networks (“cybercriminals have found that social networks are ideal pools for phishing attacks”).
#6: Outsource Partners (“companies can be a point of vulnerability”).
#5: Students (“students will happily give their passwords to friends, or create simple passwords that are easy for attackers to guess”).
#4: Professors (“the only people more careless on their computers than students are professors”).
#3: Staff Members (“recent reports said mistakes by careless employees had caused more data breaches than outside attackers had”).
#2: Thieves (“this year more than 30 colleges have reported lost or stolen computers or hard drives with sensitive data on them”).
#1: Malware and Botnets (“the Georgia Tech Information Security Center estimates that 15 percent of online computers worldwide are part of botnets“).
You can (and should) read the whole article at http://chronicle.com/free/v55/i17/17a00901.htm
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