The anti-virus software on your computer expired. You mean to walk to DoIT to pick up the free Symantec disk, but you just haven’t made the time. A nasty virus hits your computer and silently begins sending email, leaving no record behind. The virus rifles through your email address book, which includes your faculty advisor, your parents, and the department program assistant. It sends emails out to all these people with the virus attached. One of the University recipients opens it and gets infected. The virus opens that address book and finds the email addresses of Civil Engineering scholarship donors. One of the scholarship donors opens the email, gets his office computer infected, and spreads the virus throughout his company. He is incensed – “What kind of operation are they running over there?!?” As a result, his company withdraws all future scholarship funding to Civil Engineering.

You share an office with several other grad students. One of your officemates is at his desk. You leave to go to class; your desktop computer is running and logged in. The remaining officemate leaves the room and leaves the door open, thinking he’d be back in just a minute. He runs into a friend in the hallway and stops to chat, so he’s gone a while.

A former disgruntled student walks into the office and looks for computers to access. He quickly finds that you didn’t lock yours. He sits down at your computer and brings up email. Score – no password required (you set your email password to “remember me.”) He starts sending out scathing emails to Civil Engineering professors, critical of the curriculum and the school. He closes your email software and walks out the door. Later that day, you are called to your advisor’s office and asked to explain your actions. You wonder what the advisor is talking about – you didn’t send any such email. The advisor shows you a copy of the email, clearly showing your name in the “from” line.

You share out your hard drive so a fellow student can access files for a project you’re working on together. You forget to remove the share drive. A hacker scans the university networks, looking for vulnerabilities. He finds your shared drive, and uses it to take over your computer. With your computer, he then attacks one of the Civil Engineering faculty research servers. That server contains a grant proposal that is due tomorrow – funding that affects your job. The server is wiped out, and the proposal deadline is missed – no grant this year.