We are making good progress

I didn’t want to; I want to keep this column positive-ish, but here I am — writing about the hacking.

The hack left the school paralyzed, and affected every aspect of campus. The Office of Student Accounts couldn’t accept tuition. The Career Center couldn’t help students find a job. No one could even open their goddamned email.

The network was attacked sometime Thursday morning. I remember one of my co-workers telling me that stevens.edu was down. Interested, I checked. It was down. He also redirected me to an Instagram post with the ransomware message, and the hacked Twitter. I was a little surprised, but not shocked. Stevens has had a decrepit IT infrastructure (ask literally anyone who’s worked in IT) for years. It was a matter of time.

I leave my computers plugged in overnight and charging, you know, like any normal human-being. So when Stevens had apparently sent out a warning to not use and shutdown personal computers connected to the network, I was concerned. I was at work; I couldn’t get home to “safeguard” my computers and all the information on them. Additionally, I didn’t even receive the message myself. The only notification I received, at about 6 p.m., was sent to my Stevens email. The very email they told us to avoid accessing on the personal devices that we were told not to use.

What exactly happened? When would things be “working” again? Why can’t I use my personal devices that I live off of? Would The Stute have any capacity to print our orientation issue (spoiler alert: we did — to the surprise of many)? All of these questions and more raced through my mind. How would Stevens attempt to ease my own and other students’ woes?

“We have made good progress and hope to begin bringing users back online in a prioritized and very systematic way soon.”

“Addressing the systems and network issues has continued throughout the day and good progress continues to be made.”

“The return to operations is proceeding well. We are making good progress bringing our systems back up.”

“Our recovery operation continues to make very good progress.”

Apparently, the IT department had been making good progress. Good progress is when the school is without internet for two weeks. Good progress is when class schedules are barely ready for the first day of classes. Good progress is students being paid late. Good progress is a void of information.

Oh, and President Farvardin’s “profound appreciation” for Vice President for Information Technology and Chief Information Officer David Dodd.

But what can I say? I’m not surprised. Stevens doesn’t provide a lot of information to its students. My favorite example from the past? Academic break.

Between the Fall 2017 and Spring 2018 semester, the Office of the Provost sent an email announcing that the academic break would be dramatically cut from 7 hours a week to 2 short hours during Wednesday afternoons. This dramatically affected students: clubs would host events, RAs would have staff meetings, the Career Center would host panels. These events would be spread out during academic break. Now, all these events would compete with each other. Surely, some students, say, the Student Government, would have to sign off on a change this drastic — or at least have been consulted.

Nope. Ask the 2017 or 2018 SGA Cabinet. They were blindsided by the change. They were not consulted about the change until the official email was sent out. The best part? When I asked Provost Christoph Pierre about the change in Spring 2018 at the “Get the Scoop on Philanthropy” event, the Provost stated that Sara Klein talked to students about the change.

This consultation? Not telling any students and only informing Student Life (not even any students) the day before the email went out, according to former SGA President Lucas Gallo at an SGA Meeting. Yikes. Still, Pierre believed that students were informed and seemed a little taken aback when I stated that students seemed blindsided by the change. I gave him my contact information and was told that someone would get back to me with more details. That was about a year and a half ago. I’m still waiting.

But back to the hacking. Stevens keeps its students on low priority. Information is scarce about the hacking, and many essential systems for students — such as DuckLink, DuckBills, Washington Street Wednesday, and P-card usage for student organizations, are either still unavailable or took a long time to become available — and no guidance on when these services could become available. Additionally, Stevens has banned personal websites including Tinder and Pornhub on its new wireless network. The primary users of those websites here? Students.

Now, I didn’t want to start off the year on a negative note, but the hacking and its corresponding effects gave me no choice. The hack has had such a dramatic effect on students. It’s like Stevens punched us and when we ask why, they say everyone gets punched and they can’t go into more detail because of a “forensic” investigation.

Even with the attack, I’m still making good progress through senior year.