How the Berry College Office of Information Technology keeps the campus’ network safe for students.

Dylan Keck, COM 250 Reporter

Berry College is a safe place. It is a private institution, well policed and recently updated its gatehouse to provide even more security for the coveted campus.

A physical campus is something that can be monitored and controlled—but what about a college’s internet? Berry College’s OIT (Office for Information Technology) is tasked with protecting the college’s networks amidst recent threats from viruses like Ransomware.

“Berry OIT maintains firewalls that automatically inspect network traffic and prevent access to anything that is a threat,” OIT Senior Systems Engineer Matthew Forrester said. “On top of this, we also install anti-virus and endpoint security on all of our servers and Berry-owned computers.”

All three parts of Berry’s OIT—Network Operations, Enterprise Systems and User Support—update their systems daily to ensure that the network stays safe and the college’s computers stay virus-free. However, OIT is unable to ensure the same for students’ personal computers.

Students are on their own to provide antivirus and endpoint security for their computers. While most laptops come with an anti-virus system, the user is still responsible for updating their computer and making sure it is virus-free.

Recently, a virus called Ransomware has attacked personal computers worldwide. The virus targets the user’s ability to access their files, and asks for a certain sum of money in order to give the user their access back. Most of the time, Ransomware creators don’t immediately unlock the user’s access even when they’ve received payment.

There are many ways in which a virus like Ransomware can be acquired. Whether it is through visiting an unprotected site or simply opening a spam email, Ransomware can immediately infect a system and lock it up.

“In March alone, it was estimated that over 90,000 Ransomware-type infections were occurring daily,” Forrester said.

OIT says the best protection for students comes in the form of knowledge and diligence.

“Always be diligent and never take risks in downloading unknown files or inserting USB thumb drives into your computer without full knowledge of where the data or device originated,” Forrester said.

Although Berry doesn’t necessarily provide students with specific anti-virus software, like it does its own computers, the Berry Information Technology (BITs) student team is a resource for students having virus issues on their personal computers.

BITs student-worker Josh Cutter says BITs has seen a few cases of well-known viruses like Ransomware on student computers, and have diagnosed and removed them. “Students frequently come to see us with legitimate issues that we are able to help them with,” said Cutter. “We are here to save students time and money, and we accomplish that.”