Student Responsibilities

A Student's Guide to Security and Liability to Muhlenberg's Network

Use great caution in opening e-mail attachments.
Your parents used to tell you "Don't talk to strangers!" That remains important advice. According to the CERT® Coordination Center at the Software Engineering Institute, operated by Carnegie Mellon University, you should only read a message that passes all of these tests:

The Know test: Is the email from someone that you know?

The Received test: Have you received email from this sender before?

The Expect test: Were you expecting email with an attachment from this sender?

The Sense test: Does email from the sender with the contents as described in the Subject line and the name of the attachment(s) make sense? For example, would you expect the sender - let's say your Mother - to send you an email message with the Subject line "Here you have, ;o)" that contains a message with attachment - let's say AnnaKournikova.jpg.vbs? A message like that probably doesn't make sense. In fact, it happens to be an instance of the Anna Kournikova worm, and reading it can damage your system.

The Virus test: Does this email contain a virus? To determine this, you need to install and use an anti-virus program.

Student Data

In public labs:
Every student is responsible for his/her own data when working in any computer lab. Students are not permitted to save data to hard drives of lab PCs. All student data should be saved to Google Drive and/or a personal storage device/cloud storage solution.  

On student-owned PCs:
We recommend frequent backups of all work to Google Drive and/or a personal storage device/cloud storage solution

Last Revised: 04/06/2018