Last month, a security breach at Western Illinois University caused 180,000 students and alumni to be concerned about having their personal information stolen.

The server that was hacked into stores information such as social security numbers for all students who took classes at Western from 1983 to the present and 1,000 individuals from 1978-1982.

In addition to social security numbers and other sensitive information of students, the server also housed the credit card information of anyone who had purchased items from the online bookstore or stayed in the university union hotel.

On June 15, one week after the security breach, Western officials sent e-mail notifications to those who had been affected. The university also followed up by sending physical letters through the mail, the last of which was mailed July 3.

The security breach at Western has left many people wondering if something similar could happen at Eastern.

According to Chat Chatterji, assistant vice president for Information Technology Services, Eastern does all it can to prevent this type of event from happening.

“We do our best to be proactive and use products and techniques to watch our network carefully,” said Chatterji.

Eastern has ongoing contracts with vendors to provide software for the school’s mainframe, servers, network and keeping security software updated on a constant basis.

“As far as hacking,” he said, “we feel that we’re very well protected against hackers, but that doesn’t mean it can’t happen. Even the most current technologies are fallible because we are in a constant arms race between the good guys and the bad guys.”

Greg DeYoung, associate director for Campus Infrastructure Technology, said that Eastern’s network detects outside sources scanning it almost daily.

“Most companies, universities, and even home users who are connected to the Internet do experience periodic scanning of their network to see if there’s vulnerability,” said DeYoung.

The ITS department is currently in the process of hiring a new security manager whose job will be to constantly scan the network and look for suspicious activity, said Chatterji.

“That’s something else we’re adding to our arsenal of products and services to keep things as secure as possible,” he said.

Though a security manager is being hired, security is still a large part of all ITS employee positions, according to DeYoung.

“[Security] is the nature of our business any more,” he said. “The days of the early 1990s where you were just concerned about connectivity and people having access to resources without an eye toward security are gone.”

One problem faced with security is that often times users become annoyed with the precautions that need to be taken. Some examples of this include having to use different passwords to gain access to different areas and programs, mandatory password changes every 30 days and rules about what passwords can be.

“Users are often annoyed by some of the security hurdles they find now,” said Chatterji. “It’s sort of like airport security. It used to be you could get onto an airplane and you were never questioned, but now it’s an inconvenience and annoyance to have to go through this. A lot of times, it’s the same thing with computers.”

According to Chatterji, security breaches are not the number one cause of identity theft and other similar problems.

“I think the latest publicity over identity theft and those kind of problems have come about not so much from hack attacks per say, but in general, has been due to human factors,” he said.

These human factors include people misplacing flash drives, the theft of laptops that are left unattended in cars and people leaving laptops in places such as airports.

“These are human fallibilities that have caused the problems lately,” said Chatterji. “So the best we can do in cases like that is to continuously remind and educate users of our computers to be very careful about the data they store on their computers.”

Chatterji said this is especially important for faculty members and administration, especially those working from home or on laptops.

Eastern uses a virtual private network to safely encrypt information and transfer it between the servers on campus and people’s home computers. However, the problem lies in what is done with the information after it is transferred, said Chatterji.

“Once the data gets to your PC in a human readable format and it’s left on your PC at home, and the PC or laptop gets stolen, all bets are off,” said Chatterji. “It doesn’t matter how good your encryption is from your computer to here.”

The problem many people have cited with the security breach at Western is the time gap between the breach and the notification of those affected. According to Chatterji, Eastern would not delay the process.

“I know that we would do our utmost to tell the folks that we think were affected,” he said. “We would try to do it as soon as possible. We wouldn’t sit on it; we wouldn’t delay it.”