Exploring Intrution Prevention

Exploring intrusion prevention policies and procedures within Educational Institutions

Peña, Ernesto



Introduction:

The focus of this research is the intrusion prevention and insider cyber threats from those who work and or have access to labs and other facilities in educational institutions. Students that are studying engineering or related degrees gain more computer relatedabilities and look towards experimenting and/or exploiting them.

As more networked college instructional computer laboratories are attached to the Internet, the need for protection from hackers becomes evident. The attacks perpetrated can take many forms from information compromise to introducing viruses. However, one of the most dangerous is a passive takeover of a host so that it may relay attacks onother sites which allow the hacker to cover his or her tracks. (Guster & Hall, 2001).

Academic institutions prepare students for their professional field of study, but student awareness of Information Technology (IT) security issues continues to be poor (McQuade, 2007;Livermore, 2006).

Institutions must achieve a balance between offering open, accessible networks that can support resources,and collaborative applications without jeopardizing performance or security. It is especially difficult to have a combination of legacy and new applications running on dissimilar networks, creating problems for interoperability and security. These approaches make it difficult for technology teams to support existing applications, interactive courses, distance and virtual learning environments.Increasingly, a large portion of communication (Salas & Alexander, 2008) in higher education, as well as instruction (Allen & Seaman, 2010), is conducted through technology-mediated communication, such as email (Jones, 2008; Jones, Johnson-Yale, Perez & Schuler, 2007; Weiss & Hanson-Baldauf, 2008), learning management systems (Green, 2007; Hawkins & Rudy, 2007; Jacob & Issac, 2008), blogging(Nackerud & Scaletta, 2008), and social media (Allen & Seaman, 2009; Ashraf, 2009; Ellison, 2007; Gilroy, 2010; Rosen & Nelson, 2008; Saeed, Yang, & Sinnappan, 2009). College students use Internet technologies to take classes, register for courses, and communicate with other students, faculty, and administrators (Chueng & Huang, 2005; Jones, Johnson-Yale, Perez & Schuler, 2007). The need to develop anIT security awareness plan is crucial to ensure the security of student, faculty, and academic data (The Campus Computing Project, 2007).

Due to growing numbers of intrusion events and also because the internet and local network computing at educational institutions have several properties that make it vulnerable to intrusion, such lack of updated firewalls, security tools and large numbers ofuser accounts, this represents access and intrusion problems.

Educational institutions must allow nearly all network traffic through to accommodate research and teaching needs for faculty and students. This same freedom provides an opportunity for intrusion abuse. Decentralized server administrations, servers that are administered outside of information technologies departments often byuntrained personnel also represent potential security problems.

Good policy practices, cooperation between IT and Students Affair departments as well, can implement standard practices by educating students and discouraging computer abuse, fairly adjudicating offenders and protecting victims.

The problem of protecting information and data flows has existed from the very first day of informationexchange. Various approaches have been devised to protect and transfer such information securely. However, as technology and communications advance and information management systems become more powerful and distributed, the problem has taken on new and more complex dimensions and has become a major challenge.

The widespread use of wired and wireless communication networks, internet, web...