2008 Woodie Awards
For your safety, your password has expired
Rachel Yarmosh
Issue date: 1/26/06 Section: News
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Over the winter break, the IT department decided it was time for a much needed change in the internet security of Sacred Heart's students and faculty. The sheer volume and intensity of security incidents on campus networks are growing at a pace that raises questions about the adequacy of security precautions.
Virus infections, unsecured software, and a shortage of people who know how to make computers safe on the Internet are joining to make campus networks a particularly alluring target for hackers.
This transformation has come at a time when the IT staff felt there was so much sensitive data on our schools networks that such a change was necessary, not to mention the recent compromising of university's' safety through internet hacking, identity theft, among other "Internet foul play".
Mike Trimble, Assistant Vice President for Information Technology and Chief Information Officer, felt the time was necessary when we needed to tighten up our Internet security.
In taking precautionary measures, Trimble felt our school needed to take more proactive measures to prevent such cases from happening to us.
"Like all businesses, we have an audit that comes through each year. One of the main concerns we had to deal with this year was cyber security and how safe are we keeping our network. One small piece of that are passwords and IDs," said Trimble.
Since the military takes similar precautions with the data available via the Internet, IT enacted a more military-esque password policy, which means that every six months your password will expire.
"They give us a list of industry best practices and give us suggestions for change. They prefer a change in passwords every 6 weeks for administrators, but for our regular Windows access [i.e. students] only twice a year.
I tried to keep those in line with the breaks, both summer and winter since I am not comfortable forcing changes mid semester. That would only lead to confusion and miscommunications," said Trimble.