Hacking Away

I was in on this meeting today with the university’s IT security folk talking about preparedness for an attack cyber or otherwise on the IT infrastructure. It was decided that there were single points of failure — a certain attack from a certain locale could do serious damage — mostly in regard to the fiber optic trunk lines. The university now has multiple redundant connections to the Internet backbone, including an Internet 2 connection research connection. It’s kind of surreal talking about what someone who was so inclined could do — what WOULD happen if the internet suddenly went away? Most of the talk centered on the idea of a rogue individual rather than a coordinated effort, but who’s to say that wouldn’t happen? The services I run get a few million hits a month, which is small beans in the scope of the whole university, so I could feel that my babies are safe. Hacking my systems wouldn’t give anyone keys to the place — they could launch an attack from my servers I suppose, but even then there are better (and easier) targets around. It was also decided at this meeting that an inside job could do significantly more damage than someone from the outside.