Colleges Brace for Malware Wave

"Every year a quarter of the students are moving on, so those e-mail addresses are no longer valid," explained Andres Kohn, vice president for product management for Proofpoint. "That huge churn creates a lot of garbage aimed at invalid addresses, which is why universities usually have a higher percentage of spam than most other organizations."
Colleges and universities have some unique security problems facing their networks: a transient population, email churn, uniformity, centralized control, and P2P sharing.
The transient population of kids returning back to school in the fall have had their laptops everywhere with them, and they also come infected with many viruses. Many schools have started to track down who's infeted, what they're infected with, and then cleaning them up.
Another challege is the churn in email addresses in a given year. Students graduating still have email addresses, but they are no longer valid. Invalid addresses at universities explains why they are prone to receive more spam than other organizations.
Schools also find it hard to impose a uniform system of rules on their networks in order to improve security measures. They say with so many different users, the students, the faculty, and the staff, it's hard to have a flexible system to cater to their needs.
Some schools have implemeted a centralized control that stops a computer from doing anything until logged on to the network server. An agent is then placed on the computer that checks the machine for several things like does the computer have an antivirus program installed.
As far as P2P sharing, keeping on top of what noxious computer offerings incoming freshman bring with them is a challenging task as well.
The reality is that these problems also exist outside of school stteings, and those with their own computers need to take a proactive stance in ensuring their machines' safety personally. These measures will help with transporting the computer to be used on any networking system.
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