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In Survey of American Universities, MIT Scores Worst In Cybersecurity
An anonymous reader writes: In a cybersecurity survey of 485 large colleges and universities, the Massachusetts Institute of Technology came in at the bottom of the list. In a report released today, SecurityScorecard analyzed the educational institutions based on web application security, network security, endpoint security, IP reputation, patching, and other security indicators. That might not seem intuitive, but according to the linked article, it's not purely mistaken. Some of that low ranking can be chalked up to things like intentional security holes created in the course of researching vulnerabilities, but some of it comes from "exposed passwords, old legacy systems, and a bunch of administrative subdomains that seem to have been forgotten about," as well as pockets of malware.
So... I'm at another university and have another take on this, which is that freedom and security are often inversely related.
My university is pretty locked down when it comes to security, and it's also annoying as @#(! if you need to do anything creative or nonstandard research-wise. Sure, it's secure as @#$*, but also Orwellian and ignorant as @#$* also.
That is, if you want to have an institutional culture that's built around "hey! take this stuff and play around with it without any restrictions" you can't also be saying "hey! don't do that!" to every thing they do.
My guess is something like that is going on.