News

From ITaP's Messaging team regarding recent spam and phishing attacks:

Subject: [aitlf] Higher than normal spam volume over the past week

All,

We have been seeing a very large increase in the number connections to the external mail routers for smtp.purdue.edu over the last week. At first we were only getting scattered reports of increased spam due to the increased connections, but that changed this weekend.

Many Purdue users have received mail over the past several days with the subject line: "{Suspension Of Your purdue.edu Account}" that appear at first glance to come from an ITaP source. These are "phishing" attack email messages that are attempting to collect Purdue usernames and passwords.

On Tuesday, July 10, ItaP will be making a change in their security certificates for PAL. If not properly updated some users may find that they can no longer authenticate to PAL. The wireless configuration on your device must be updated in order to allow you to connect to PAL with the new PAL security certificate.

We have received word that a package coming through Apple's Software Update is causing some systems to "kernel panic," i.e. crash and not reboot.

The update in question is "Thunderbolt 1.2." Thunderbolt is Apple's successor to Firewire and this update includes some new drivers that have been shown this morning to crash some Macintosh systems. This is especially true of MacBook Pro systems.

We suggest that you not install this update to prevent the possible issue with kernel panic. This does *not* apply to all Apple updates including future Thunderbolt updates.

Many people across campus are experiencing email problems due to an outage experienced this weekend on ITaP's Exchange cluster. Certain Mac OS X email clients and some non-Outlook clients on other platforms are still experiencing Exchange connect problems this morning.

Members of the Macintosh Community are reporting a rather serious security hole with version 10.7.3 of Mac OS X Lion and some versions of Snow Leopard and Lion Server. The flaw is specifically known to affect FileVault users but, in some specific configurations, might affect other users as well. Due to a programming error passwords are being recorded in plain text in the Macintosh log files under certain conditions. Persons who have direct access your Mac could potentially look into the log files and collect the passwords of the users who have recently logged into the machine.

Amdahl.physics.purdue.edu is NO longer to be used for computation. Amdahl's hardware will be removed as part of the data center consolidation project, Summer 2012.

Purdue Physics has partnered with The Rosen Center for Advanced Computing to provide access to their Hansen cluster. An advanced user guide about Hansen is provided here.

Please contact PCN for Hansen account creation and access.

PCN has now compiled a comprehensive listing of software which is available for checkout for both Purdue-owned equipment along with Personally-owned equipment from the Physics Computer Network.

Visit the Software Licensing Wiki page for more information. 

On Wednesday, January 19th, 2011, the Exchange servers will be down for one hour between 6pm and midnight.  Due to the number of servers your specific outage time cannot be determined.  However, this will affect the ability to send/receive email through a desktop client, OWA, and any mobile device (such as Android, BlackBerry or iPhone).

 More information can be obtained regarding this outage at the ITaP website. 

Please take notice of the following. 

On Friday, 8/20/10; Wednesday, 8/25/10; Thursday, 8/26/10; and Friday, 8/27/10 from 3:00 AM to 6:59 AM each day, the IT Networks & Security Data Team will be upgrading a portion of the BoilerNet network to meet the new Purdue Network 2010 standard. Specifically the network will be upgraded in the Physics Building (PHYS).