Established in 1890, University of Oklahoma is a public research university based in Norman, Oklahoma with an undergraduate population of 20,000+ and over 10,000 staff members, including faculty. With three separate campuses and few overarching security policies, Aaron Baillio, Chief Information Security Officer, was tasked with building a cybersecurity program that would introduce a unified process and mitigate security threats.
The most public facing and pivotal issue they faced was compromised email accounts; if an employee was phished, they would start sending thousands of emails and then the number of compromised accounts would exponentially grow. “We recognized the culprit was weak passwords and that the introduction of a password policy could mitigate these attacks. Once we combined operations, my focus was to build out a strategy our staff could comfortably adhere to.”