In the hopes of getting everyone in the Department to read and understand network security-related policies, we have attempted to distill our practical experience into the following guidelines. It is important to know that when you connect your computer to the CS network it is directly attached to the public Internet, and these security precautions must be followed.
USE STRONG PASSWORDS
The Computer Science department has a number of network protection measures in place to guard against attacks on the network. If the machine you are using is on the internal CS network that machine is behind a network firewall. We do are best to protect our users from attacks but we also need help from the users to protect themselves from network based attacks. As people are becoming more and more mobile with computing, the security risks also becoming much higher. Connecting laptops to insecure networks is more common as people travel and move around from network to network.
The CS Department runs a firewall to protect internal hosts from unwanted external network traffic. Due to the nature of firewalls, this can sometimes cause problems for some applications or services that reside behind firewall. If you are experiencing a problem that you believe is caused by the firewall, please contact CS Staff so we can work with you to find a solution. By default we block all incoming network ports from outside the department into those network subnets where we place personal workstations.
The Computer Science Department network is protected by many different layers of security to protect us from unwanted intrusions. Most user machines within the network are protected from intrusion from outside hosts by our firewall, which limits access to these machines. However, a good security model requires the cooperation of all those who are affected by it. Therefore, it is important that even users' personal machines are secure.
