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Syracuse University faculty and staff are required to complete a mandatory information security awareness training on MySlice before March 31, according to an SU news release on Wednesday.

Faculty and staff must complete the training in accordance with New York state requirements, the release said. The training included topics such as understanding data and the corresponding threats as well as protecting data.

“Even in the last few months, we have seen bad actors adapt to new security measures,” said Christopher Croad, SU’s chief information security officer, in the release. “These training sessions are essential to discuss best practices and to learn how to protect against new threats.”

SU has been under scrutiny for its history on safeguarding faculty and student privacy as well as data security. The university revealed in February 2021 that the names and Social Security numbers of nearly 10,000 SU students, alumni and applicants were compromised due to a data breach after someone gained unauthorized access to an employee’s email account in September 2020. SU did not immediately notify those who were impacted.

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More stories about SU’s 2021 data breach:

• Student files class action lawsuit against SU over data breach that affected 10,000
• SU defends response to data breach amid criticism, anger
• SU data breach exposes nearly 10,000 names, Social Security numbers
  

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In fall 2021, the university implemented fingerprint scanning in dining halls for students with unlimited meal plans. Although university officials told The Daily Orange that SU’s Housing, Meal Plan, and I.D. Card Services does not store biometric data, multiple students expressed concerns over the security of their biometric information to The D.O., partially given SU’s data breach the year prior.

At the time, SU also confirmed that the fingerprint scanning system uses a mathematical representation of a person’s biometrics data as a coded file, which is impossible to reverse engineer back into the original hand scan.

The Security Awareness training video can be accessed through the Employee Home page on MySlice, under the Employee Resource tile.

Faculty and employees will need to enter a code provided at the end of the training video to receive full credit, according to the release. The training will take 30-35 minutes. Questions can be directed to the university’s Information Security IT analyst Sarah Marciniak at [email protected].

Published on February 20, 2022 at 10:09 pm

Contact Francis: [email protected] | @francis_towne