Dear Members of the Carleton Community,
October is National Cyber Security Awareness month and time for our annual reminder to take information security training! Since the beginning of the school year, seven threats have been identified and resolved by ITS staff.
Unfortunately, these sorts of attacks show no signs of letting up. Fortunately, Carleton and St. Olaf have developed a series of straightforward measures that you can implement on your own. As we all may have encounters with institutional sensitive data, let’s ensure that our data remains secure. Got five minutes? Setting up Two-Factor identification will dramatically improve the security of your digital life. This has become standard practice in HR, ITS and the Business Office, among others, and you should strongly consider it. And with 15 extra minutes, you can add a powerful measure of security to your mobile devices or enhance your login credentials in many different realms of your personal and professional life. Training—and much additional information besides—is housed on InfoSec101. All faculty and staff are encouraged to take this training. Please check it out!
And, no, you’re not alone. Your actions to improve the security of your own computing practices are being complimented by a series of protections elsewhere to help you make your life safer and easier. For example, you’ll soon notice automated notifications stemming from our partnership with CloudLock. These will warn you when you have inadvertently “over-shared” confidential data that might leave you—and Carleton—vulnerable to a preventable privacy breach. This and other forthcoming innovations recognize that strong information security starts with individual users and is backstopped by strong institutional support.
Yours in security,The Privacy, Risk, and Security Advisory Group: Kerstin Cárdenas and Janet Scannell (co-chairs), Marla Erickson, Randie Johnson, Marit Lysne, Andrew Fisher, Carla Thomas, Adam Webster, Dave Flynn [with support from Rob Alaimo and Carly Born to prepare the InfoSec101 course]