Security Incident Reporting

The Colorado School of Mines takes seriously all complaints about inappropriate traffic originating from our network and encourages anyone who suspects a problem to contact us. The Mines Office of Information Security (OIS) is responsible for coordinating the response to complaints regarding violations of ITS computer and network usage policies.

Examples of Issues to Report to Other Mines Offices

• If you are having any experience that you feel is harassing or threatening, please contact the appropriate authority immediately. If you are not sure who to report the activity to, please contact Mines Public Safety at 303.273.3333.  If you feel that you are in immediate danger, call 911.

• Copyright holders wishing to file a complaint under the Digital Millennium Copyright Act (DMCA) should contact the ITS DMCA team directly.

Reporting an Incident to ITS

You can report any problem or issue to ITS by any means (including the link immediately above), but for non-emergency situations we encourage you to file your report with Mines Help Center (http://helpcenter.mines.edu).

To help us respond to your report appropriately we need as much information as possible.  At a minimum we will need the following information:

• The time of the incident being reported including time zone.
• The IP address or hostname of the computer that received the suspect traffic.
• The email address that received suspect traffic.
• The IP address or hostname that was the source of the unwanted traffic/email.

In addition, any of the following will facilitate our response:

• If you are reporting a hacking attempt, we need to know the type of traffic (ICMP, TCP or UDP) and any port numbers or service names you may have.
• If the traffic was detected by a firewall or an intrusion detection system, any relevant log entries.
• If you are reporting an email virus or SPAM, please include the original message with all headers, as an attachment to your report.
• Any additional information you may have is always welcome.

When reporting an incident please use the following contact guidelines:

• If  you are being actively attacked or are experiencing a loss of service, please call the ITS main number at 303.384.2345 and ask to be transferred to someone in the network or security office.
• If you are not currently experiencing problems, please send your report via email.
• For more information about contacting us, including copies of public keys that will be used to sign all communication, please see our contacts page.

What to expect:

• You should expect to receive an emailed acknowledgment of your complaint within 24 business hours. We may also ask for additional information to help us investigate your report.
• If the attack is currently in progress, you should expect the traffic to stop shortly after we have verified your report. If the traffic does not stop, please call the main ITS number, 303.384.2345, and ask to be transferred to someone in the network or security office.

• Once we have completed the investigation of a complaint, we will email a summary of our findings.  Due to legal restrictions on the release of information about our students, this summary is typically very brief.  Under normal circumstances we will acknowledge that we have found the source of the traffic and have dealt with any issues.  We will, of course, also report anything we find that suggests a serious security threat to your systems.