It’s been a relatively calm week for IT issues. That said, there are a few of items to mention.
1 – I received a notice late Monday evening (10/30) that there was another disruption to Frontier’s trunk line that services some of the K-20 locations including “Wenatchee REC” (how we are identified on their network). The “service interruption” started @7:30 pm and went on until sometime around 6 am. Luckily this was not during regular working hours. However, if you had any data being backed-up remotely, you could have been affected. I eventually received an explanation of the problem from Nick Pappin on campus. Here’s what we know:
“Zayo (upstream of your circuit provider, Frontier), is moving fiber that serves your sites, because it runs through a building that is being demolished. Unfortunately, we were not notified in advance, leading to the unexpected outage last night.
The same maintenance work is continuing tonight and tomorrow night, between 1900 and 0700. Because of the imminent demolition, we are unable to have the work rescheduled. We do not expect your service to be down for that whole duration, but that is the window that Zayo has given for their work.”
2 – Phishing has still been heavy. I got four nearly identical emails yesterday alone. Just remember to forward all suspicious emails to abuse@wsu.edu — even if they look identical. Each email comes from a different infected email account. Campus IT will fix the mailbox belonging to the person who’s email has been hijacked, contact the domain owner for which the underlying links go to, block the originating IP from accessing WSU’s systems, and even report their finding to the FBI as needed. Reporting these emails helps all of us.
FYI – When you forward the fake email to abuse@wsu.edu you often get an automated response. And sometimes the “advice” they give you isn’t really appropriate to your current situation. For instance, you might get instructions on how to block the email sender. Unfortunately, we are getting emails from senders within the WSU email system. We can’t block people at WSU (no matter how badly you might want to). If you were to get one of these phishing attempts from someone outside WSU, I would definitely block that person. Their email provider may not be as quick to detect and clean the bad sender account.
3 – Authentication through MyWSU has experienced some “glitches”. They have been making “adjustments” and hope to have the problems resolved quickly. I have also experienced other network authentication problems where I’ve had to resign-in multiple times in a row to get my email. Hopefully, that issue will be resolved concurrently.
AMS/video conferencing
There have been a couple of issues this week. First, Kesey experienced a problem with losing the camera feed in the Stockwell room during her class. She could see and hear content, and they could hear her, but they couldn’t see her. Reconnecting the session probably would have resolved the problem, but she would have missed class time. It’s unknown what the cause was, but we are monitoring to see if there is a repeat of that behavior. The other issue occurred during Thursday morning during Sarah’s class in the large conference room. The system would not call in. Kelsey contacted Brian with AMS and he remotely rebooted the system just in time for the start of class. There may have been a short power disruption to the room’s unit necessitating the reboot. Again, we will monitor to see if the behavior is repeated.
That’s it for this weeks review. You may also want to check out my other post this week simple tips to keep your computer and devices secure from hacking. See Cyber Security Tips