I just wanted to catch you up on some of the stuff going on with WSU IT updates and fixes, as well as inform you about some recent phishing attempts.
New email phishing – These are getting a bit more sophisticated. This week I and several people here at the Center have received the following malicious emails: (click to enlarge)
The first email appears to be from Microsoft asking you to verify that you requested your email account to be terminated. DO NOT CLICK. please forward to abuse @wsu.edu
The second email feeds on people’s greed in that it says B of A is giving you money. DO NOT CLICK on the confirm deposit link. it will no doubt ask for your banking information.
As for all suspect emails, look at the grammar, spelling, and subject matter. Why would a WSU person be contacting you about “bank of America’? If it feels suspect, it probably is a scam.
Phone scams – Phone scams are similar to phishing emails in that they usually threaten you in some way or voice some urgency. I keep getting three different phone scams on my cell phone. All ‘appear’ to come from a different phone number each time because they are computer generated and can spoof any number they want to use. Sometimes they are local numbers or at least in-state, other times they are from another state. The other common factor is that after you answer the phone there is a delay before the recording kicks in with a computer-generated voice that uses odd syntax (similar to the emails), or is a recording of a person. The first phone scam I get says it’s regarding my credit card or some bank account that may have been compromised and I need to contact them immediately to correct the problem. The second scam says that there is a problem with my tax filing and that I have 24 hours to respond or face being “taken into custody”. The third type of call I’ve received is a bit sneakier. This one is a live person that sounds like they are calling from a call center with other voices heard in the background working with other clients. The person asks if I am the owner or user of the “the computer” and that they have detected a problem that they need to fix immediately or my Windows computer will stop working. This is obviously a ploy to get me to give them access to my computer. (I thought this was a particularly ridiculous scam being that I don’t use a Windows computer.) Unless you have purchased a specialized monitoring service you will never be contacted out of the blue to tell you that your computer has an issue.
There isn’t a lot you can do about these calls other than just hang up or delete the voice message. You can report the phone number and have the number blocked, but since the number changes each time you will likely still get calls until they take you off their attack list.
Campus ITS News/Updates
myWSU changes – Campus was supposed to launch the new myWSU home page this morning. Unfortunately, they ran into some technical issues. They will send out another notice with a new launch date. Information Technology Services (ITS) offers a series of how-to videos via the myWSU enhancement project updates webpage that covers all the changes.
K20 outage – There was a significant outage to the K20 network last night. It didn’t appear that TFREC had any issues re-connecting once it came back online.
Border firewall maintenance – Border firewalls will be replaced at 9 AM Saturday morning. The switch over will terminate all connections to and from the Pullman campus to the Internet during the switchover that will start at 9 AM and last about 5-10 minutes. Although not likely, maintenance may continue in the following two hours in case of any issues that may result from the switch over with possible very brief outages during that period.
Enterprise Certificate Authority changes – ITS will be adding firewall rules to address a communication issue with the Enterprise Certificate Authority on June 6 at 5 pm. No impact to users is expected.
Pullman ITS Virtual Infrastructure changes – ITS updated the Pure storage arrays to release 5.0.7 of the Purity O/S on May 30th. This impacted the VMs on the WSU ITS VM infrastructure. This update was reportedly non-disruptive to users.
Linex Production Patching – Linux systems managed by ITS will be updated tonight from 7 pm to midnight and will include newly releasedpatches. As part of these updates, individual systems may need to be rebooted.
mail.wsu.edu DNS change – The DNS record for mail.wsu.edu has been updated. ITS will monitor the old mail.wsu.edu servers for any stray traffic and will attempt to contact admins for any machine that continues to use the old servers.