Viruses and other nasties are a leadership issue — ICT & Computing in Education

“I hate using these computers! I can’t put any of my software on them.”

The speaker was a science teacher, and the computers in question were stand-alone ones, not linked to any of the school’s networks.

“That”, I replied, “is the general idea”.

It may seem counterintutive for the person in charge of education technology in a school to lock equipment down so much that it can be used only in certain ways. However, if you view part of your job as making the kit usable by anyone, and another part of your job as protecting both teachers and pupils from software that could cause them harm in some way, then you have to take certain measures.

You might think that having antivirus protection is enough, but I think it’s worth going further, just in case. Another department in the school, which had their own laptops that they were in charge of, allowed anyone to use whatever software they liked. One day a rather distressed teacher came to me with one of the laptops he’d taken home from there because he couldn’t do anything with it. He’d allowed his son to install a games program he’d found on a diskette. Unfortunately, either the diskette or the program had not been checked for viruses, so the laptop ended up being riddled with them.

The stand-alone desktops and laptops under my care, on the other hand, were locked down in three ways. One was that I’d disabled the access to any other drive apart from the C drive. Another was that I’d installed a Windows shell which gave access to only the standard programs. Finally, this being in the days before wi-fi was ubiquitous, they were not connected to the internet while they were in school.

To be honest, anyone who knew what they were doing could have circumvented these measures, but I was banking on the fact that not many people would know enough to do so. Also, I think if you make something difficult enough for people, they’ll give up sooner rather than later.

Things have changed, right?

That was around 25 years ago, and things have changed since then, right? Well, there are plenty more viruses , trojans, spyware and other stuff around these days. Also, I can virtually guarantee that every time I go into a school to advise them on their computer use I will discover at least one person who brings in their own laptop or software that has not been checked for viruses.

Also, an interesting survey from Malwarebytes has been brought to my attention by the Aspectus Group. Admittedly, Malwarebytes is not exactly an unbiased source, but then very few sources are. The research is still interesting and thought-provoking though. Here’s what the press release says: