As you may have read in the media and in your email inbox, cyber-attacks of all types are on the increase, and each of us need to be more vigilant than ever before clicking on links in emails, or responding to unknown senders.

But you’re not alone in the fight against phishing, viruses and malicious links. ITS is working hard to minimize our users’ exposure to nefarious attempts at attacking the institution and our data. And that work starts with a strong Firewall.

A Firewall is, first and foremost, a wall! It provides a barrier between our internal network – including systems such as Banner, WordPress and Outlook – and the external internet. Our Firewalls allows us to monitor traffic requests into the Clark network, and refuse traffic that is malicious and looking to compromise our users and our data. The easiest way to demonstrate how important the Firewall is to our security, is to share some numbers.

Since the beginning of the semester our Firewall has blocked over 2 BILLION attempts to access our network from general malicious actors and over 70,000 specific attempts to spoof Clark University email addresses. Additionally, our partnership with Microsoft has blocked over 5 million additional spam emails, and 12 million instances of malware. The technology that we use leverages machine learning, so that it identifies trends in new threats, learns from our users’ behavior and becomes more effective every day.

Without this technology, it would be impossible to run our campus effectively or securely. It allows us to communicate with Clarkies and external partners and greatly minimizes the percentage of attacks to reach your inbox. From there, we rely on you. So, don’t forget to ‘think twice, click once’ and follow our guidelines (click here to read) to help prevent cyberattacks on our network and data.