UC Berkeley Cleaning up its Security Act

Bob Brown writes "UC Berkeley recently issued a scathing self-assessment of its IT department, which has been under fire in the wake of a couple of high profile security lapses at the school. NetworkWorld has a review of what the school's top networking guy says is being done to both secure and strengthen UC Berkeley's computer networks."

Comments

20 years later and still the same

[penguin-collective]

Berkeley UNIX (the original BSD) was full of security holes. It shipped with such beauties like being able to get a shell by typing the right command at the SMTP server and multiple buffer overflow bugs in just about every server and command line program. And many people knew about it, both at Berkeley and elsewhere, but nobody cared much until the Morris worm. Apparently, while the world has moved forward, Berkeley still isn't taking security all that seriously.

Re:Faulty Password Protection

[joe 155]

It sounds like you might be making a joke about this one but at my university (University of Warwick, uk) they had the worlds most lax attitude to security it was insane. There were several huge security leaks and no one seemed to question why they weren't using and changing secure passwords... someone script kiddie broke into the main server (taking all of our private info stored on it) using nothing more than a simple brute force crack... it gave in so easily because they'd used a word from a standard dictionary... I figure it would have taken no more than 60 seconds to get in. The moral of this and the UC Berkeley story is this; don't trust a university IT dept with any of your private information, store nothing on their computers, use a different password for the log on there and for everything else (if you insist on using the same one everywhere)