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Don't let us charge you $50!

The President's Executive Committee and the Deans' Council have approved a $50 fee to be charged to restore service to a USU Network Data Port after that port has been turned off because of a risk to security or service delivery by a compromised computer. This charge was implemented July 1, 2004 to cover the typical staff costs of investigating these incidents and taking protective action.

When Information Technology has evidence that a computer:

is infected with a virus, worm or Trojan or
has an open email relay or
has been hacked by unauthorized users or
is otherwise interfering with the normal operation of the campus network,

the data port will be disabled to protect USU's network resources from that risk.

We recommend that each computer connected to the network should be actively managed by an employee who is charged with implementing best practices to minimize those risks. Those practices include:

Applying all patches provided by the operating system vendor (see, for instance, USU's Microsoft Windows update mirror: http://wsus.ss.usu.edu);
keeping virus protection updated daily using the USU-licensed McAfee software (see: http://mcafee.usu.edu);
disabling all unused file-sharing and network services (see, for instance: 8 Steps to Protect Your Computer);
providing good password security for authorized users;
insuring good user practices to protect the physical security of the computer;
registering with IT as the manager-of-record for those computers (see: http://thingy.usu.edu/tcpip.html);
joining the campus Network-Managers group and email list (see: http://lists.usu.edu/mailman/listinfo/network-managers).

Because of the possibility that a data port has been disabled to protect the network, we recommend against the practice of moving a computer to a different data port as a test of port functionality. If the computer is compromised, the move could result in the other port being disabled, and an additional restoration fee charged.

To reduce the impact of this fee, we will charge $25 the first time a particular data port is shut off. Subsequent shut offs for the same data port will result in a $50 charge. For assistance recovering from a shutoff see:

http://it.usu.edu/htm/networking/port-disabled

We would be glad to never detect any incidents which require us to shut off a network port under these guidelines.