IT Security in Libraries

At the recent LITA (Library Information Technology Association) conference, I attended a pre-conference session on technology security in libraries. Blake Carver, the library security professional who presented the talk, had a great deal to say about staying secure on your library computers – he covered topics from password security to server configurations that will help to make all of our services more secure. For many of our member libraries, the NEKLS IT team is your IT security team – so getting this information from him was invaluable for our ability to protect you all from the bad guys on the Internet! One suggestion he made was to use long passwords – really long passwords. He suggested that 24 characters was a good length for which you should aim. Of course, not everything you have a password for is equally valuable, so those short passwords are fine for stuff that is in no way tied to your identity or your bank account.… Read the rest