News
Locky Ransomware
CAS Information Technology has come across a number of computers infected with a ransomware named Locky.
In these cases, all of the documents on the computer were encrypted and at this point, are unrecoverable.
The computers require a complete rebuild before they can be returned. The infections came from an email attachment, which may have been labeled “Invoice” or something similar, which delivered their payload upon being opened.
Because of this, I'd like to remind everyone not to open attachments you are not expecting, and pay close attention to the email address of the sender. If you are unsure if a message is legitimate, please feel free to contact our office at 617 353-5930 or cashelp@bu.edu.
This is also a reminder to review your data backup practices, which our office can provide assistance with.
More information about Locky can be found here: https://nakedsecurity.sophos.com/2016/02/17/locky-ransomware-what-you-need-to-know/
Hacked Printers
Some of you may have seen or heard of neo-Nazi fliers being printed from university computers. This has happened in several departments on campus, and has affected at least a dozen institutions across the country.
If you encounter this issue please submit a help ticket and we will assist you as soon as possible.
You can read more about the issue here:
Moving E-mail to the Cloud
As part of a service improvement project for email, IS&T will be migrating Exchange accounts from on campus servers up to Microsoft’s Office 365 Exchange cloud service. There are many benefits to the new Office 365 service, including the following:
•Access to online versions of the Microsoft Office suite applications (Word, Excel, Outlook)
•1 Terabyte of storage included with Microsoft One Drive
•A 50 GB email quota
The transition from the current email server to the Microsoft 365 services will be starting the end of February. We will be reaching out to people on an individual basis before the migration, which should be a relatively painless process. There are a few circumstances that will require reconfiguration of email clients, and we will have staff available the morning after the scheduled transition to assist with fixing those settings. From testing and the migrations we have already performed, Outlook and iOS devices have updated their settings automatically and required few manual changes.
There is additional information about this migration on this page on the BU Tech Web website: http://www.bu.edu/tech/services/comm/email/exchange/office365/
The URL for BU’s Webmail will also be changing post-migration, the new site is located here: http://outlook.office365.com/
Please let us know if you have any questions.
Service-Now
Good Morning - CAS IT has now changed over to using Service-Now, which is the Help Request tool used by IS&T. Using this tool will help us work better with IS&T, and route tickets faster to the appropriate groups, cutting down response times.
Due to this change, we have changed our webform to allow for submissions into Service-Now through our site.
Please let us know if you have any feedback, issues or concerns.
Wireless Access for BU Guests
IS&T is pleased to announce that it will now be much easier for visitors to the Charles River Campus to access the Internet over the BU Guest (unencrypted) wireless network. Visitors can now quickly and easily register themselves using a valid email address or mobile phone text message, with no need for BU-affiliated sponsorship. To do so, guests should select "BU Guest (unencrypted)" from the available wireless networks and then open a new web browser window; they will then be guided through the registration.
All BU schools and departments will benefit from this change, but particularly staff and their guests from Events and Conference Services, Housing, Admissions, Orientation, the Deans Office, FitRec and more. A similar change for the Medical Campus is planned for January 27th.
Please contact the IT Help Center with any questions or issues regarding this new approach to BU guest wireless service.
Boston University Information Services & Technology
IT Help Center
ithelp@bu.edu
617-353-HELP(4357)
www.bu.edu/tech
CASFSA/CASFSB problems
We've had numerous reports of problems connecting to casfsa and casfsb this morning. We made a security change over the weekend that makes shortcuts that do not include the .bu.edu extension to not work properly. If you are having problems connecting, please try to follow the instructions on this page (or under the Fileserver link above) and if you are connecting to casfsb, use that in place of casfsa.bu.edu. Please submit tickets for assistance with recreating shortcuts, and we will address those as soon as we can.
Thank you and we apologize for the inconvenience.
CASFSA/CASFSB Outage
This Friday, June 20th, CASFSA and CASFSB will taken offline at 5:30 pm as part of a planned power outage at 685 Commonwealth Avenue. The file servers will be offline until Saturday at 10 am. All of our other servers will be offline as well due to the extended outage. We apologize for any inconvenience this will cause.
CASFSA/CASFSB Outage
This Friday, June 13th, CASFSA and B will taken offline at 5:30 pm as part of a planned power outage at 685 Commonwealth Avenue. The file servers will be offline until Saturday at 10 am. All of our other servers will be offline as well due to the extended outage. We apologize for the inconvenience this will cause.
More information on the E-mail Scam
Good Afternoon,
Over the past 48 hours there have been several BU email accounts compromised and used to send messages to people internally. If you receive a message with the subject “Boston University Staff and Faculty only” or the message asks you to click on a link to increase your email account size, please delete the message. These are attempts to gain access to your BU account and possibly access into your personal information within BU Works. Additionally, any other accounts that are compromised in this manner will also be used to continue to send these messages. These are coming from actual BU email accounts and most likely will not be detected as junk mail.
If you have questions about whether messages you receive are legitimate, you can feel free to contact us at cashelp@bu.edu or call us at 617 353-5930 and pass along the email to confirm whether or not it is a valid message.
Please note that IS&T and CAS IT will NOT request your login information through an email.
There is additional information on Spoof messages and Phishing on the IS&T website here:
http://www.bu.edu/tech/services/comm/email/unwanted-email/help/
E-mail scam
You may have received an e-mail recently with the subject heading "Re: BU MEMBER©:-ACCOUNT UPDATE."
The text of the e-mail reads:
"Dear Member,
For Security Purpose and SSL Server Upgrade,
E-mail Access has been Temporarily Suspended.
Click To Re -Activate Your BU
Regards,
© 2013-2014 Trustees of Boston University"
This e-mail is a phishing scam. Delete the e-mail, and do not click the link. Please e-mail us if you have any questions.