Securing your laptop, PC and data is difficult? Not necessarily! You might not have noticed, but the IT department put under the Christmas tree a wide range of tools which likely improve the security of your data, laptop and PC. Let us present here a few. It's for your protection.
- Antivirus software. The CERN-chosen antivirus software comes for free installation on your office computer/laptop as well as on your personal Windows or Mac devices like those at home. Just get it installed. If you prefer “more” central assistance, join CERN’s Windows management framework (CMF) - or the Mac Self-Service. Centrally managed Windows PCs come with centrally managed antivirus software by default.
- Full disk encryption. CERN provides centrally managed encryption solutions for Windows PCs (Bitlocker) as well as Macs (Filevault) and Linux CentOS (LUKS). Advantage of those solutions is that they are completely transparent and you don’t need to hassle with back-up or recovery key storage. Just contact the ServiceDesk to get your hard disk encrypted!
- PC hardening. The Computer Security Team and the Windows Desktop support team are currently working on guidelines on how to harden PCs to a maximum (while keeping them still usable). A draft of such guidelines can be found here. But beware, this is for the paranoid or for very dedicated usecases!
- Secure file exchange. Instead of handing out confidential files to Dropbox and alike, CERN is hosting “CERNbox”, a file synchronization service for Android and iOS smart phones, tablets, PCs and laptops. While the data resides well protected within CERN, it is available and sharable through-out the world.
Apart from those four, CERN’s IT department provides you with a wider range of central services so you don’t need to reinvent the wheel: Database-on-demand, Drupal, Java or Sharepoint hosted websites, central storages and back-up solutions (AFS, DFS, CASTOR, and Tivoli, to name a few). Please find a complete list of their offerings here. In addition, a dedicated webpage presents a comparison between commercial/off-site solutions and similar solutions provided in-house by the IT department.
For further information, questions or help, check our website or contact us at Computer.Security@cern.ch.
Do you want to learn more about computer security incidents and issues at CERN? Follow our Monthly Report.