.PWL spin

Kevin L Prigge Kevin.L.Prigge-2 at cis.umn.edu
Fri Dec 15 21:09:13 PST 1995


According to rumor, anonymous-remailer at shell.portal.com said:
> 
> 
> On Sat, 9 Dec 1995, Joel McNamara wrote:
> 
> > One system administrator said the problem would have a greater effect on
> > less-secure environments, such as universities and other institutions,
> > than on corporations.
> 
> I didn't quite understand the "corporate speak" here.  It sounds like
> something coming from Bosnia or something.  It's Greek to me.
> 
> What would make a University less secure than a corporation??

1) Usually more net connected hosts.
2) Lack of adequate sysadmin attention/knowlege.
3) Vague and poorly enforced site security policies.

This is of course a generalization, but corporations seem to
have more money and time to throw at security. On the other 
hand, it's common at Universities to get a new Sun/SGI/whatever,
hook it to the net, and run it without spending a lot of time
configuring it. 

> 
> Universities (at least the ones, I've checked) have entire departments
> and theoreticians devoted to Computers ... companies usually don't.  

Just because a University has a CS department doesn't mean that it
is more secure. Even if security is an area of study, it doesn't
mean that other departments benefit from the research.

> 
> I'd think that Universities are much, much more secure environments than
> corporations are.  Doesn't Microsoft know this??  Or is this unique to
> Seattle?? 

I don't know what University sites you're referring to, my experience
has been that on the average, .edu sites are less secure than .com
sites.

-- 
Kevin L. Prigge        |"A computer lets you make more mistakes faster 
UofM Central Computing | than any invention in human history--with the 
email: klp at umn.edu     | possible exceptions of handguns and tequila."
01001001110101100110001| - Mitch Ratcliffe






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