As the University of Michigan recovers from a cybersecurity attack and days-long campus-wide Wi-Fi outage, Michigan State University is hoping individuals can help best secure its network from potential threats.
MSU Deputy Spokesperson Dan Olsen said Wednesday that MSU’s IT department is “vigilant when it comes to cybersecurity threats" - but that’s only half the equation.
Richard Forno, assistant director of the University of Maryland Center for Cybersecurity, agreed, saying that trusting institutions to secure networks can only go so far, because each device a user connects to it is a potential entry for malicious actors.
“If I bring my laptop into a university environment and connect, it has to be at least moderately secure,” Forno said. “Because if not, some bad person could target my device and use it as their back-door into the network I’m logged into.”
Forno laid out two simple things user can do to best secure their online presence:
- Don’t use the same password across multiple services. He especially warned against repeating passwords for important accounts like banks or investments and less sophisticated systems like local newspaper subscriptions.
- Regularly check emails, banks and credit reports to see if someone has attempted to steal your information.
Cyber-attacks can also come through links and attachments in emails. MSU students or staff who receive suspicious emails should forward the messages to abuse@msu.edu so they can be handled by the university’s IT department, Olsen said. If they engaged with a link in the suspicious email and provided their log-in information, they should also reset their password.
What exactly led to the outage at UM remains unclear. In a letter announcing the network's restoration on Wednesday, UM president Santo Ono wrote that “investigative work into the security issue continues and we are not able to share any information that might compromise the investigation.”
The attack serves as a reminder that because universities are “enticing targets” for increasingly-sophisticated bad actors, individuals must be vigilant, Forno said.
“We can't expect just the IT department to protect everything,” Forno said. “We have a responsibility as the users.”
