Student

Our campus is planning to implement two new cloud-based e-mail and calendaring services: Google Apps for Higher Education and Microsoft Office 365. Sounds great, but what are cloud-based services (aka cloud computing) and why are we moving our e-mail services to them?

The campus has recently been targeted by malicious e-mails that appear to be attempts to gain user information such as passwords. One such phishing e-mail was supposedly from the University of Colorado Help Desk and urges colorado.edu account owners to login to a “newer login page.” Individuals who received this e-mail should simply delete the message.

If you or someone in your department responded to this phishing attempt and entered user information, that person should contact the IT Service Center during regular business hours at 303-735-4357 (5-HELP from a campus phone).

Symantec has released a notification stating users that utilize a MacBook Air (Model 5,2) or a MacBook Pro (Model 10,1) should not enable the PGP Whole Disk Encryption (WDE) feature. Enabling the feature will create problems at boot-time that will render the MacBook un-bootable.

Due to past issues when upgrading OS X, Symantec is advising that users currently encrypted with PGP Whole Disk Encryption or SEE Full Disk Encryption for Macs should NOT upgrade to OS X 10.8 when made available by Apple.

Symantec will release more information once it is available.

We are here to serve you, and if you’re not happy, we’re not happy. We love to hear how we can improve our support and services to better serve you. Of course we also appreciate hearing about how someone exceeded your customer service expectations. So there are lots of ways for you to provide feedback to us.

Starting with the fall 2012 semester, our campus will once again be a one-online-learning-environment campus as CULearn will be replaced by Desire2Learn (D2L) at the start of the new academic year. Both online learning environments will continue to run in parallel through the summer 2012 terms, but CULearn will not be available after August 31. Therefore, we strongly encourage you to start using D2L now, for any summer courses you may be teaching.

The campus has recently been targeted by a number of malicious e-mails that appear to be attempts to gain user information such as passwords. One recent phishing e-mail, with the subject line “Mail Quota Exceeded,” urges recipients to send account information, including a password, to increase their quota. A second message, with a subject line of “From Microsoft Exchange Admin,” urges account owners to click on an upgrade link in order to “upgrade to our new 25GB Webmail.” Individuals who received these e-mail should simply delete the messages.

Even when it comes time for you to graduate and move on to the next chapter of your life, you won’t need to part with your colorado.edu e-mail address. In fact, you can keep it for life. The E-mail for Life program, which is provided through a partnership with the CU Alumni Association, will allow you to keep your registered colorado.edu e-mail addresses: you can continue receiving messages at both your CULoginName@colorado.eduand FirstName.LastName@colorado.eduaddresses.

CUConnect (cuconnect.colorado.edu), the original CU-Boulder campus portal, will be retired on May 14. As of the end of March, the last of the critical functionality in CUConnect has been transferred to the new campus portal, MyCUInfo (mycuinfo.colorado.edu).

OIT Selects New Vendor for Service Management Tool

The Office of Information Technology (OIT), in collaboration with faculty, staff and students, has chosen a new IT Service Management tool to facilitate IT support across campus. The tool, provided by ServiceNow, will replace the current SupportWorks system in the coming months.  

Timeline

• OIT will be working diligently throughout the summer to work with partner IT organizations to implement this tool.

Background

The campus VPN service now includes a mobile app that allows Apple devices to use the VPN. Junos Pulse is a free application available in the Apple App Store. The campus VPN allows you to make a secure on-campus network connection, when you are off campus or on UCB Wireless, so you can access restricted campus services such as library resources or file servers. Currently CU-Boulder does not officially support a VPN option for Android users. Although, there is a Junos Pulse application for Android, it does not have full functionality and is not recommended.

The campus has recently been targeted by malicious e-mails that appear to be attempts to gain user information by asking recipients to login to a spoofed e-mail login page. Individuals who received these e-mails should simply delete the messages. The campus IT Security Office is taking steps to block connections from campus to this phishing site.

Following is a sample message:

From: University of Colorado
Date: Thu, Mar 15, 2012 at 1:51 PM
Subject: Important Account Maintenance

Studying the earth’s snow and ice can create a lot of heat. Cooling the National Snow and Ice Data Center’s computer room, where researchers from around the world access data about the earth’s snow and ice, used to require over 300,000 kilowatt-hours of energy per year or enough to power 34 homes. “There was a certain irony that here we are working on climate research and our data center was consuming an awful lot of power,” said David Gallaher, Technical Services Manager for NSIDC.

The campus has recently been targeted by malicious e-mails that appear to be attempts to gain user information such as passwords. One recent phishing e-mail was supposedly from “CULink Email Alert” urging account owners to submit personal information for account verification. Individuals who received this e-mail should simply delete the message.

If you or someone in your department responded to the CULink phishing attempt and entered user information, that person should contact the IT Service Center during regular business hours at 303-735-4357 (5-HELP from a campus phone).

Keeping up to date with the latest IT news, security notices, service alerts and project updates doesn’t need to be a time consuming process. That’s because the OIT website has all this information and more, most of it available as a subscription-based RSS feed.

Why shop around for software when in many cases you can get it through the campus for discounted prices or in some cases no user fee at all. The campus site licensing webpage is your key to finding the best deals on our campus for Microsoft and Apple office applications and operating systems for faculty and staff computers, as well as curriculum-specific software for statistics, graphing, math and research for students, faculty and staff.