Our Cyber Hygiene campaign was launched last month! We’ve already seen some significant progress in OS patching cadence and rates of unpatched vulnerabilities across campus (kudos to the Student Affairs IT team!). 

Our Cyber Hygiene campaign launched in January, and the Product Strategy & Communications team did an amazing job creating a brand with Mr. Cyber Clean. This is the first time we’ve been able to present a focused, unified view of our institution’s cyber health using data and metrics and it’s exciting to see all of the data come together. We can think of this as a full-body health check-up for our IT infrastructure, where multiple vital signs come together to paint a complete picture of our security wellness. 

Last month we talked about security posture, and how our posture is the collective result of all the activities we do to protect our environment, from scanning for vulnerabilities, to applying patches, to managing app configurations. Every action we take works together to create a comprehensive defense against potential threats. It is simply a fact that most of the actions that need to happen in order to maintain secure systems cannot be performed by us here in Security, but rather by our colleagues in colleges and divisions across the campus. Here in security, we collect and manage so much data — sometimes it's hard to know how to take that raw data and transform it into action. So how do we get all our security-related data in the hands of the staff that can use it to make a difference?

This question is the driving force behind the Cyber Hygiene campaign. By focusing on a small number of actionable metrics, we keep the goals attainable. By focusing on behaviors that are fundamental to cyber health — like patching cadence, credential hygiene, and inventory accuracy — we work to build habits within our organization that directly impact our security posture in fast, measurable ways. When security hygiene practices become habitual instead of reactive, it frees us up to focus on innovation and service rather than risk response.

It’s very important that we don’t let this campaign become an exercise in blame. Using data to help drive better habits means that initially, some of the metrics are going to look scary – there might be a lot of red. But the data is the data, and not paying attention doesn't make the data better, and we can’t keep our heads in the sand. Instead, we can view it as an opportunity to improve some specific areas of our security posture, and build new organizational habits over time. Small actions, done consistently across teams, can have a big impact.

• The Elastic project continues to grow. We are ingesting nearly 9 billion log entries per day, with a single high peak of 12.1 billion! There are now over 33,000 hosts reporting into the Elastic stack. This has been a phenomenal effort from multiple teams across Security & other verticals, and the scale that we have grown into with Elastic is impressive.
  
  
• The Cyber Hygiene Campaign was launched to all Technology Services employees. This effort will focus on improving our security posture by focusing on patching, password hygiene, and accurate inventory management.
  
  
• IT Security & Risk will be well-represented at the TAMUS Tech Summit this year; four presentations from our staff were accepted for breakout sessions; Cynthia Kauder will be co-presenting with the System on Title II changes, and the CISO will be presenting about Axonius at the TAMUS annual Information Security Council meeting.
  
  

📈 Just in the last month:

• 8.8B log events collected per day
• 11 petabytes of network data scanned
• 132M mail messages scanned for spam, phishing, viruses; 97M messages blocked at gateway
• 6.8M Entra authentication events
• 2.7M Duo auth events across 237k active NetIDs 
• 170k devices tracked in the IT asset management system

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Our spring all-hands meeting is Wednesday, February 12 @ 11am. There’s a change of venue for this meeting — we’ll be at the CIR building on the RELLIS campus (room 1107). Look for directions and maps in the calendar invitation sent last month.

There are two upcoming Technically Speaking events that are associated with the Cyber Hygiene campaign. Mark your calendars to attend and support your fellow security team members:

• Securing Your Systems: CVE Management and Vulnerability Assessment by Kristen Kubenka and Mo Alcastromco on February 19th @ 10:30 am (registration link)
• Cloud Vulnerabilities and You: Patching Your Cloud Environments by Robert Stricklin and Chris Hall on March 26th @ 1:30 pm

Adam Mikeal

Associate Vice President and Chief Information Security Officer