Bohemian Rhapsody?

OK this wasn't quite the Queen classic but a visit from Ales and Michal from the University of West Bohemia (which is in Plzen in the Czech Republic). The URL definitely gets a high score in scrabble! These guys are on a study tour and after two months researching managed to get responses from 6 Universities (including us) to talk about "security incident handling". Ales has a chief security role and led the meeting with an agenda which covered CESNET (the equivalent of JANET), the issues of staff working at home, the issue of staff and students connecting unprotected and virused equipment, the issue of firewalls and access servers and basically all the same sorts of issues we face here. Interestingly, we felt that the incidents at Bradford were probably a factor lower (2-3 per month versus 20-30 per month) so perhaps the various policies and procedures are working to our advantage. It will be interesting to see how we benchmark against other UK places in the final report. Perhaps the main action out of the discussions was a need to clarify some policies on retention periods for email (years?) and firewall logs (weeks?) among other things. The University is close to Prague (80 miles) so next visit will hopefully be reciprocal!!