PCN 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.