Information Security @ Widener

Security Welcome

Welcome to the Information Security page for ITS at Widener University! Please browse this page for info about computing security, privacy, policy and procedures, and updates. Thanks for visiting!

Reporting Phishing

To report a phishing email, forward it to phish@widener.edu.

Personal Info – Protected!

The Family Educational Rights and Privacy Act of 1974 (FERPA) governs the types of student information that educational institutions are legally permitted to share, as well as the information that we have a duty to protect. Foremost on the list is the student’s Social Security Number (SSN), or Federal ID. Widener blocks all outgoing SSNs to protect this information.

Widener’s email domain (WUMail) has a domain (after the “@”) of widener.edu, and email that passes between users of that domain does not travel over the Internet. For those internal emails, SSNs can be sent without being quarantined.

Since we cannot do a user-by-user analysis of emails, all outgoing SSNs are blocked. This includes faculty and staff emails as well.

There is an alternative to sending emails with SSN or other personal information; since your personal email address (Gmail, Hotmail, Yahoo, and others) is not university-managed, and since webmail is encrypted (using https), those services are a good alternative choice to using Widener mail servers for personal data.

Widener’s FERPA Policy can be found here (link)

 

 

Legal Alternatives to P2P Filesharing

Although file-sharing is a popular method of sharing music, video, games, and other content, the sharing of copyrighted material is illegal, and is prohibited by Widener policy. In addition, technical blocks have been put in place to prevent it.

However, there are many ways to get free or very inexpensive access to a nearly unlimited amount of popular content.

A few of the most popular are:

Pandora

Spotify

Amazon Instant
(including Prime)

Netflix

Steam

SoundCloud

Last.fm

Bandcamp

There are many more – a longer list is available at EDUCAUSE (link)