It’s been a fairly uneventful week for IT issues. The two biggest issues have been phishing & scams and slow internet. As a reminder for the phishing & scams, don’t click on links inside questionable emails. Review the Phishing Gallery if you still are not sure what a questionable email looks like. Also, if you visit a website that opens a pop-up saying something about you or your account being hacked, close your browser window and quit the browser. If the popup said they were stealing your data – unplug from the internet. The next thing would be to contact Cougtek or cit.support, if this is on your work computer, or call your service provider if this is your private computer at home. Also, if this was a bank site, contacting them would be a good idea to make sure your account was not breached. Another idea would be to jump on a different machine and use Google to search for any postings regarding the incident. For instance, if the problem occurred when you were on a specific website and there was something specific stated in the popup message, you can pose a question in Google giving the site name and the statement. Chances are good that somebody else has encountered the same thing and there’s probably an answer to how they solved the problem.
As for the internet slowdown, there is no immediate solution. The most likely culprit is our K20 connection. CAHNRS IT is looking into the possibility of bringing in a separate internet connection into Overley (most likely from LocalTel) to serve as a fail safe to switch over to when the other line fails or drops below a set transmission threshold. Why not just completely switch over? Cost, mostly. We get a huge break in data service using the K20 network. If we go forward with this, they (CAHNRS IT) will piggyback onto the installation of the other planned work on our network and equipment along with improving our wireless capability. Stay tuned!
Alert
Mac High Sierra (10.13) admin authentication vulnerability The new Mac operating system has a critical security vulnerability that would allow anyone to hack into your system. It by-passes entering a password to access your root system. Fortunately, Apple has released an update (10.13.1) that fixes this problem. If you are using High Sierra, you need to update ASAP if you haven’t already done so. For more information: https://www.us-cert.gov/ncas/current-activity/2017/11/29/Apple-Releases-Security-Update-macOS-High-Sierra
Campus IT Updates & Maintenance
Pullman phone system upgrades Minimal impact, if any, on us. However, there were scattered reports of off-behavior by a couple peoples’ phones. One phone would not make calls and gave a beep-peep disconnect signal after dialing. This phone had to be unplugged for up to 10 minutes before it regained full function. Another phone lost the use of the handset – no sound. Unplugging for 10 seconds returned it to full function. Unknown if either was related to what campus did or just coincidence.
Campus emergency firewall updates – Looks like it went off without any issues.
Eduroam guest Wi-Fi on the Pullman campus – Campus announced on Tuesday that Pullman now has a new WIFI service available that allows guest users from other research and educational organizations access to a wireless network without having to request a ‘Wireless Guest’ account when they travel. Instead, individuals can use their home institution username and password.
WSU students/staff/faculty/researchers are also able to use their NID at other institutions participating in Eduroam. A list of participating institutions can be found at https://www.eduroam.us/institutions. However, this is for GUEST usage only. WSU students/staff/faculty while on the Pullman campus need to use the ‘WSU Wireless’ SSID instead of the Eduroam guest SSID.
There will be a formal WSU announcement within the next two weeks. If you have any questions, please direct them to CougTech at 335-4357.
Scheduled maintenance of the Oracle Managed Cloud Services This impacts the myWSU Campus Solutions production environment. Work is scheduled to begin Saturday at 2 am to 7 am and Sunday 3 am to 7 am. Access to myWSU will be available, but users may experience unexpected results if they log in during the maintenance period.
Migration of mainframe services to the Cloud Dec. 2-3 Information Technology Services (ITS) will be migrating the on-premises mainframe to cloud hosting. The system will go offline at 2 am on Dec. 2nd and the cloud services will be available no later than 10 pm Sunday, Dec. 3rd. During this period AIS services, e-check processing, and other services dependent upon the mainframe will be unavailable. Once the migration is complete, all services should function normally.