There are 3 management ills released by this change:

1. Apparently, a person unqualified for IT work made the decision to go with the lower cost application. That sounds very much like purchasing making a co-called cost reduction so they can put this on their list of accomplishments.

2. A new, very important, untried application was not tried out before unleashing it system wide. A dummy account should have been created in the "sandbox" region of the server and the application tried there for a period of time. Many of the ills you mentioned should have shown up in the sandbox version and would have been contained. This would have given the system operators a chance either correct the software or reject it.

3. Somehow, the system's virus checker was disabled or uninstalled.

The SANDBOX: Many years ago, makers of large servers included a "sandbox" in their operating system. This is a feature that carves off a section of memory, and isolates it from the remainder of the computer. When accessed from outside the installation, it appears like a complete system. Its a place to experiment and give neophytes a place to roam. Any damage done is confined to the sandbox. Also, the system operators can use the sandbox to test to see if their corporate system is under attack by intruders, by lowering the protection on the sandbox and then watching for what comes in.

The disturbing thing to me is you work at a university. I think someone needs to lose their job if they didn't see this coming. Wonder what kind of personal information is being leaked?

I agree with workoutlady. I work at a public higher education institution and the danger of leaked student info is very real. And it is closely regulated by federal law.

Interesting. I used to work in the county government. I never had any spam-type stuff on my computer.

Your tax dollars at work!

I appreciate and respect government employees but I think such jobs are often filled by people looking for those things about public sector jobs that differ from private sector jobs - security, stability, retirement benefits, etc, and oftentimes they expect the jobs to be less demanding. In less urban or remote areas, such positions may be filled by just people available in the area rather than people from elsewhere who may be more capable. Sometimes the very most capable people for a given job type are more attracted by private sector positions that by their nature can be more risky, more demanding, and have greater financial rewards. Not always.

I'm not necessarily speaking about bob's specific situation, but it would seem that the choices faced by this university's department management were ones that were beyond their ability to assess and make good decisions on.

I think the University has been hacked badly a couple of times over the last few years. They never give the details of what happened. Supposedly this is because that could aid other hackers in attacking us. I'm sure the fact that it could also make the systems support staff look like incompetent goofballs doesn't enter into the decision. I heard rumors that one of the hacks was only noticed by a different institution who contacted our people saying they were finding personally identifiable information from us out in the wild, and suggested we check whether anything was amiss. It was.

The newer mail filtering application is supposedly live now, and the deluge of spam has abated somewhat, however a couple of spam messages I received today had subject headings that started with **virus warning: this message contains a virus open it at your own risk**

That doesn't seem like a good way for the new system to handle messages containing viruses.