Last year, as a result of no longer having the printed Gator Engineering fiscal year calendars, we created a PST file containing UF holidays, UF important dates, football games, and many other events that people could import into their personal Outlook calendars. Despite a little problem with being over zealous with TEAMS personal holidays, that PST was an overwhelming success. So much so that we've had numerous requests to do it again... and provide it in iCal format as well.

The recent Information Technology Risk Assessment conducted by the College of Engineering revealed that we need to work harder at protecting sensitive data. As a step in correcting this problem, the College of Engineering MIS group is initiating a program to improve security related to the use, storage, and transmission of data defined by UF policy as 'UF Restricted'.

We've seen a drastic increase tonight in the amount of phishing attempts to our users.  As a result, I'm sending this friendly reminder that this is not legitimate.  In the past we've sent warnings of similar attempts to get you to reveal your mail username and password.

On Thursday, March 28th I emailed you about the University's plan to sunset GLAUTH web authentication in favor of a new Identity and Access Management (IAM) solution, Shibboleth. We then promptly received a few questions on how the process of requesting Shibboleth access works and how to fill out the access request forms. The steps for obtaining access are documented on the Shibboleth website. However, the College of Engineering will handle things a little differently in order to ensure consistency among all access requests.

While not necessarily computer related here is a little bit of security information that could save you a lot of hassle and a bit of money that is provided by the Commonwealth Bank of Australia. It's a short presentation aimed at raising awareness about ATM card skimming and PIN capturing. ATM skimming is a world-wide problem which uses various types of technology to capture data from the magnetic strip on the back of an ATM card. Take a look at the PDF presentation to find out more and see examples of devices.

Yesterday it was announced that the GLAUTH method of using gatorlink username/passwords for 
authentication to web applications will be turned off in 'about a year'.  Also, it is currently unsupported 
and is no longer available on CNS websites for use.  The new method for doing this type of 
authentication is using a standards based, open source identity and access management application 
called Shibboleth. 

FYI, this was just sent through the DDD listserv.  The policy would better be called 'Policy Regarding Mass E-mails to ALL Students' since it applies only to messages sent to ALL UF students.  Anything sent to smaller groups of students, such as sending through Department and College maintain listservs, are exempt from this approval process.

As you know, our mail server lost a hard drive at the beginning of March. The process of recovering from that failure was long and difficult and forced us to reevaluate some of the management practices of the server.  To address various performance issues and prepare you for future changes to the server we are asking you to make changes to your email habits:

It has been awhile since the last update regarding the EG-ADM Exchange server recovery process.  As of the last update the only outstanding item was recovery of the March 4th email for mailboxes in the '02-storage group' (being mailboxes in the 'Deans Office', 'MIS', 'Other', and 'RGP').  I am happy to report that I now have a process that will enable me to recover this email.  The entire process will take a few days to complete due to the size and number of mailboxes and the process involved.

Yesterday morning we were notified that Weil Hall will have a power and HVAC outage this Saturday, 2009-04-18, between 8:00 AM and 4:00 PM (the text of the announcement is below).  This will negatively impact network and computer services managed by MIS resulting in the complete network outage of the building during this time.

Michael Vana knew something was up when he saw the pop-up from 'Antivirus 2009' in the middle of his screen. The former Northwest Airlines avionics technician guessed that the dire warning of a system infection was fake, but when he clicked on the X to close the window, it expanded to fill his screen. To get rid of it, he had to shut down his PC.

March 25, 2009 (Computerworld) Cybercrooks have hit on a new twist to their aggressive marketing of fake security software and are duping users into downloading a file utility that holds users' data for ransom, security researchers warned today.

While so-called scareware has plagued computer users for months, those campaigns have relied on phony antivirus products that pretend to trap malware but actually only exist to pester people into ponying up as much as $50 to stop the bogus warnings.