Ransomware continues to plague higher education and the State of Georgia and the Information Security & Network Services unit of IT has identified weaknesses in the configuration of employee computers that may allow this particularly malicious form of software to spread across the GHC network once a device becomes infected. In order to reduce the potential impact of ransomware and reduce the institution’s overall risk of attack, IT will be enhancing the security controls on staff workstations and laptops based on the recommendations set forth in the IT Risk Assessment Executive Summary presented to President’s Cabinet. These enhancements will require an IT administrator to authorize a major system change or software installation, prevent some forms of privileged system access, and will be enacted remotely on January 30th, 2020.

If you encounter any issues with your GHC-issued computer that may be related to this change, please contact IT (rt@highlands.edu) so that we can provide assistance.