Re: Anti-virus Options for Students

[Brian Helman <bhelman () SALEMSTATE EDU>]

This is kind of related to the NAC discussion that's floating around.  We do require AV and enforce it at the NAC.  I 
hate the NAC (purely because it's just timely to manage), but since we've fired it up, requiring an AV, we haven't had 
a student-based malware/av outage (2 years now).  Yes, coordinating the pay/free AV's is difficult, but it's less 
frustrating than the outages that previously ocurred.

-Brian

________________________________________
From: The EDUCAUSE Security Constituent Group Listserv [SECURITY () LISTSERV EDUCAUSE EDU] on behalf of King, Ronald A. 
[raking () NSU EDU]
Sent: Thursday, December 13, 2012 4:02 PM
To: SECURITY () LISTSERV EDUCAUSE EDU
Subject: Re: [SECURITY] Anti-virus Options for Students

We don’t require them to have an AV installed.  When we detect malicious activity on the network, we remove their 
access and suggest well known free for personal use solutions (AVG, AVIRA, AVAST, MSE) before restoring access.  The 
only product (so far/knock on wood) that we have had issues with has been McAfee.  At the start of this fall semester, 
we had a larger group (of students) than usual experiencing problems accessing our wireless.  Turns out a recent update 
prevented their systems from authenticating.  McAfee published a knowledgebase article at the time on how to update 
their product to fix it.  We are small enough that this works for us.

If you have a NAC solution checking for AV products, that will have a significant bearing on what you will suggest or 
dictate.  We found that not all products or their updates were detected correctly.  For example, if I recall the 
version numbers correctly, when AVG went from 2010 to 2011, our NAC solution detected the host as being out of 
compliance.  It took special registry checks to identify it correctly while we waited for the NAC vendor to provide 
updated definitions.  We ended up turning off the AV detection in NAC for that and a few other reasons.


Ronald King
Security Engineer
Norfolk State University
http://security.nsu.edu<http://security.nsu.edu/>

From: The EDUCAUSE Security Constituent Group Listserv [mailto:SECURITY () LISTSERV EDUCAUSE EDU] On Behalf Of Robert 
Yoka
Sent: Monday, December 10, 2012 11:17 PM
To: SECURITY () LISTSERV EDUCAUSE EDU
Subject: [SECURITY] Anti-virus Options for Students

Our institution has started having the discussion of whether or not we will allow students to use anti-virus software 
other than our corporate standard (McAfee).

Are other schools out there allowing students to use the AV programs of their choosing?  If so, what impact has it had 
on your help desk as far as support time/issues?  If not, are you allowing students to choose from a limited, 
pre-selected set of AV choices or forcing all of them to use one corporate standard AV program, enforced by a NAC 
solution?

Thanks,
--
Robert J. Yoka, CISSP
Information Security Administrator
Information Technology
York College of Pennsylvania
441 Country Club Road
York, PA 17403

Email: ryoka () ycp edu<mailto:ryoka () ycp edu>
Voice: 717-815-1784
Cell: 717-577-0737


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