EDITOR'S NOTES
Better Safe Than Sorry
by Dick Kaser
Hacker attacks. Data breaches. Ransomware bugs. Clickbait gimmicks. Phishing attempts. Fake identities. Our digital world is full of cybercrime, and your library’s network is at risk. In this issue, we focus on how to keep your systems, your data, and your users safe.
Library security expert Steve Albrecht leads off with a rundown of the top 10 risks public and academic libraries face, not just from nefarious, anonymous cybercriminals, but also from those who appear in person to disrupt library operations.
Not all attacks come from the outside. The thumb drive that a patron wants to plug in to one of your public access computers may include a Trojan horse. Or a patron surfing the web may innocently click on an email attachment that contains a virus or a media file (such as a photo or video) that is embedded with nasty code, as Felicia Smith (a librarian and former criminal investigator) describes in her article about malicious steganography and other risks associated with AI-based technology.
While remotely hosted research databases may be at the core of your digital library, they require user authentication, which can be compromised. The issue includes two case studies on how OCLC’s EZproxy authentication application proved to be the answer to thwarting certain hacker attempts and fixing network security breaches.
As more and more library systems move to the cloud, you may be wondering if it is safe. Columnist Marshall Breeding gives cloud services a thumbs-up in his discussion of library network security. And columnists Terence Huwe and Jessamyn West take on data security, given recent news about how unethical uses of Big Data mining can expose us to risks we could hardly have imagined a few years ago.
Stay safe.
Dick Kaser, Executive Editor
kaser@infotoday.com
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