We’ve updated our CC Important Dates file for the 09-10 year (July 09 - June 2010).  See our page for instructions on how to import the dates into your Outlook calendar: http://helpdesk.coloradocollege.edu/index.php/tips-and-how-to/email/add-important-cc-dates/

A new account expiration policy has gone into effect as of 6/1/09 - we’ve posted the update to our site if you would like to see the details of the new policy: http://helpdesk.coloradocollege.edu/index.php/policies-and-procedures/account-expiration/

Adobe recently announced a critical vulnerability in their Acrobat Reader product which already has known exploits, and have come out with a new version to fix the issue – since Adobe Acrobat Reader is a widely used product, this is an important update for everyone to get.  You can see more information about this update here: http://www.adobe.com/support/security/bulletins/apsb09-04.html

* For CC-owned PCs, we will be pushing out the new version of Acrobat Reader over the next week.  The installation happens in the background (you won’t see any notification on the screen) and takes about 5-10 minutes.  Even if you’re working at the time, the only thing you may notice is your computer running a bit slower during the install.

* For personally owned PCs (including students), we recommend downloading and installing the latest version of Adobe Reader (9.1) as the best way to update.  We haven’t had much luck with Adobe’s software update process, and a clean installation of the newest version seems to be the best. You can find it at http://www.adobe.com – just click the “get adobe reader” button and proceed with the installation from there.

* For all Macintosh computers, if you have Adobe Acrobat Reader installed, check for an update by opening Adobe Reader and going to Help > Check for Updates.  If it finds one, please follow the instructions for installing the update right away.

Information Management has completed the Spring 2009 password audit. Of the 4000+ active accounts audited, 152 were cracked by the password auditing software. This is a definite improvement to last year’s audit. Congratulations to those of you who use strong passwords and defeated the password auditing software!

The 152 users whose passwords were cracked will be receiving an email in the next few days notifying them that they will be required to change their passwords by Monday, April 27^th 2009.

A good password has a mix of letters, numbers, and special characters, and no discernable names or words which could be found in the dictionary.  Try to make your password easy for you to remember, but look like a bunch of gibberish.  For example, turn the phrase “I like to study in Barnes 209” into the password “il2siB209” – presto, a good secure password that’s nice and easy to remember!

Please keep in mind that passwords are one of the most important aspects of IT security. The overall IT security infrastructure is only as strong as users’ passwords, and even a single password compromise can have a catastrophic impact upon that infrastructure.  For more information about how you can protect yourself from all manner of IT-related threats, including identity theft, please see our comprehensive webpage here: http://helpdesk.coloradocollege.edu/index.php/tips-and-how-to/protect-your-computer/

We will be taking PROWL offline early Wednesday morning, 3/18 (from 6:00am - 9:00am) in order to allocate more storage and make sure there won’t be any problems with storage space in PROWL through the end of this year.

It will be back up and running as normal no later than 9:00am.  Let us know if you have any questions!

As a reminder, Information Management’s next pre-scheduled systems maintenance day is tomorrow, Friday, March 13.  As a result, all network services will be down at various times between 6:00 AM and 12:00 PM.  This includes:

* Internet

* Email (messages sent to you will be queued, so they won’t be lost)

* Wireless

* All network drives

* All network printers

* All servers

* Banner / GoWEST

* C3PO

Our one remaining scheduled maintenance day for the 08-09 academic year is Friday, May 29, 2009  (after commencement).

Thanks to all of you for your patience and understanding!

You likely received an email in the past few days claiming to be from the “Email Support Edu Team” or “Colorado College email support team”.  The subject line is generally “Colorado College email address: urgent message from the portal”, and it goes on to claim that we are “upgrading our site” and saying that you have to send us your username and password to ensure your account is not disabled / deleted.This message is a phishing scam (in fact, it’s almost the same as similar scams in October of 2008, and January of 2009 with some wording changes – both of which resulted in CC email getting blacklisted by major email providers for several days).  Please ignore and delete it.

A reminder – we will never ask for your username / password over email.  If an email asks you for that type of private information, no matter what it looks like or who it claims to be from, you can immediately identify it as a scam.

For more information and tips on how to spot scams and protect yourself and your computer from these types of malicious attacks, see our informative webpage here: http://helpdesk.coloradocollege.edu/index.php/tips-and-how-to/protect-your-computer/

Many of you have noticed the recent problems accessing network drives and computers booting up exceedingly slow – the problems started on Friday and have been on and off throughout the weekend and into this morning.

We wanted to let you know that these issues were caused by a few computers on campus (2 macs and 1 pc) which were infected with multiple pieces of malware (an all-inclusive term for viruses, worms, spyware, etc.) and used to send “denial of service” attacks at our servers (namely, fileserver1) from within our network. Our new network design prevented this from becoming a full network outage, but fileserver1 has been unavailable for parts of the past 3 days, causing people to lose access to some network drives (H:, I:, personalwebs, etc.) and PCs with automatic connections to one of these drives to boot very slowly.

The problems are solved for the moment, and we are cleaning the malware off those 3 computers – if you find that you do not have a network drive available that you expect to be there, you can log off and back on (or simply reboot) your computer and the drives will show up.

We encourage all of you to educate yourself about how to protect your computers from these types of threats – we do what we can centrally, but the most important methods of preventing malware infection and identity theft are up to each of you individually. We have an extensive guide which is a good place to start hosted on our Help Desk website here: http://helpdesk.coloradocollege.edu/index.php/tips-and-how-to/protect-your-computer/ and are happy to answer any questions you might have.

You likely received an email in the past few days claiming to be from the Help Desk.  The subject line is generally “Quarantine Maintenance in Progress”, and it goes on to claim that your email is too large and that you should reply to the message with your username and password to ensure your account is not disabled / deleted.This message is a scam (in fact, it’s almost the same as a similar scam in October of 2008, with some slight wording changes).  Please ignore and delete it.

A reminder – we will never ask for your username / password over email.  If you see that in a message, you can immediately identify it as a scam.

For more information and tips on how to spot scams and protect yourself and your computer from these types of malicious attacks, see our informative webpage here: http://helpdesk.coloradocollege.edu/index.php/tips-and-how-to/protect-your-computer/

We wanted to alert you about a virus going around right now which is being spread primarily via facebook. It takes the form of a message sent to your facebook inbox from someone on your friends list – the message will have a little bit of text and a link to a website which seems legitimate, at which point a flash-based video will begin playing. After going for a few seconds, a message will pop up saying you need to update flash player. If you click okay, you will install the virus.

This is a particularly difficult virus to spot, so we wanted to make everyone aware of it as soon as possible.

It’s a good example of the latest trendy viruses which disguise themselves as updates to programs such as flash or quicktime. If you see a message asking you to update a software package like this, we would recommend closing the popup and navigating directly to the appropriate site (i.e. http://www.adobe.com/products/flashplayer/) to download the update (in this case, there isn’t a real update since it’s a hoax). If you’re not sure which site to navigate to, you can usually type the name of the software in a google search and find it that way. This is a good habit to get into, since it will help protect you against update scams via popups, such as this one.

If you’ve accidentally installed the virus, you should open your antivirus client and run any available updates, and then a full scan – it should find and quarantine or remove it. It would also be a good idea to change your facebook password.