With the world becoming more digitally involved every day the importance of cybersecurity for organizations worldwide has grown exponentially. Here on Brophy’s campus, the cybersecurity system was developed and thought through to keep Brophy’s data secure.
“We spend a considerable amount of time thinking about cybersecurity and protection, both in terms of protecting people and protecting data,” said Assistant Principal for Instruction and Innovation Mr. Mica Mulloy ’99.
A study from NPR pointed out that schools are at higher risk of cybersecurity attacks due to the value of school data and the underdeveloped cybersecurity of some school systems.
Schools tend to hold lots of information on students including family and medical information that could be valuable to hackers.
Hackers aim to steal valuable data that schools have on students to either steal their identities or hold the data for ransom.
Mr. Mulloy said, “We have lots and lots of data on students who are mostly minors. Privacy is really important to us, so we want to make sure all of our student data is secure and private.”
Brophy’s data is stored on well-protected servers on a cloud making it more difficult to steal.
For data stored on campus, Mr. Mulloy said, “Servers that we do host on campus all have a pretty significant level of security on them. They are backed up multiple times a day, with the data stored in what’s known as an offsite air gap.”
An Air gap is a method of data storage in which data is backed up constantly to allow the data on the storage to remain safe from any hacking or bugs that may affect them.
Brophy’s use of Macbooks and Apple products allows people on campus to have less of a chance of getting a virus on their computer.
“It is not as prevalent in enterprise, therefore people are writing less malware and less virus for it,” said Senior IT Systems Administrator, Mr. Matthew Rubin.
Macbooks not only create a more secure environment but also allow the technology department to monitor the network more efficiently.
Brophy’s constant monitoring of our network adds to the increased security.
Mr. Mulloy ’99 said, “We have access to network reports about what is being done on campus, we have access to if malware pops up on someone’s computer or if somebody is blocked from something, and those are all opportunities to have conversations with students to see what they were doing.”
Having access to the reports on the network allows our technology department to alert and stop any possible threats before they become a problem.
Brophy has a secure and well-protected network, but our technology department tries to educate people on campus to eliminate the number of threats.
Mr. Mulloy said, “We do phishing email training on the adult side, helping train people to identify what emails are real.”
These phishing emails appear as normal Google emails attempting to bait people into entering their email and password.
For students to be more safe Mr. Rubin recommended “being aware of giving your password away and of fishy and sketchy sites because they could rip off all your data information.”
