Upgrades, outages, ebook downloads, and vacation

A little bit of everything in this post.

First, there will be some minor upgrades in Blackboard Vista during our usual Sunday (7/27) morning (6-10am) maintenance.

Second, Banner will be down on Sunday (7/27), technically from 11:30 pm Sat (7/26) to 11:50 pm Sun (7/27).

Third, I forgot to announce the World Ebook Fair this year, but there is still time. The Fair collects in one place over one million ebooks, text and audio, all available for download between July 4 and Aug 4. Some of these are collections that are normally free, like the Internet Archive, Project Gutenberg, and government reports, but others are commercial products offering free and discounted ebooks especially for the fair. Many languages are included, both fiction and nonfiction, even sheet music from the IMSLP/Petrucci Music Library.

Fourth, I'm going on vacation for the next week, and then the week after that (Aug 4-8) I'll be busy with the campus SummerTech Faculty Technology workshop. I will keep an eye on my email, but I don't promise to respond right away! I'll try and remember to check my voicemail, too, but I'm really bad about that. So if you need to get in touch with me, use email. Library access problems should go directly to the reference desk, (203) 392-5732 or eref@southernct.edu.

So, instead of using Vista or Banner this Sunday, download some ebooks, and I'll "see" you all in a couple of weeks!

Spam warning

I think this is our first campus specific spam. The Office of Information Technology send the following warning this morning:

To All Faculty and Staff,

Several people have reported the receipt of an email with the subject “FINAL NOTIFICATION!!!” that appears to come from the “SOUTHERNCT WEBMAIL SUPPORT TEAM [supportteam@southernct.edu]”. The message itself is as follows:

Dear SOUTHERNCT Webmail Subscriber

This mail is to inform all our {SOUTHERNCT} webmail users that we will be maintaining and upgrading our website in a couple of days from now.As a Subscriber you are required to send us your Email account details to enable us know if you are still making use of your mailbox. Be informed that we will be deleting all mail account that is not functioning to enable us create more space for new subscribers, You are to send your mail account details which are as follows:

*User Name:

*Password:

Failure to do this will immediately render your email address deactivated from our database.

Thank you for using SOUTHERNCT

FROM THE SOUTHERNCT SUPPORT TEAM

Please be advised that this email is spam. It is a phishing scheme designed to get your username and password. Do not reply to this. Simply delete it.

Unfortunately, the timing of our Microsoft Exchange implementation makes this message more confusing and believable. However, please be advised that the OIT staff will never send an email out asking you for your username and password. Also, another clue that this is not legitimate is that OIT will not send emails out with all upper case letters in the “Subject” header.

We will be investigating this email and will try to include it in our spam gateway rules.

Thank you for your continued vigilance in privacy, security, and malware issues.

The OIT Staff

You should never respond to any email requesting your account password. Real IT folks have access to our accounts--they don't need our passwords. The only situation I can think of where an IT help staffer has ever asked me for a password was at the end of a long, multi-email and phone exchange trying to figure out why what I saw looked different than what she saw. No service or site worth anything would send a request like this with no previous contact.

Another clue about this, by the way, is the curly brackets around the SOUTHERNCT in the first sentence. Spammers exchange "form letter" type texts, usually copied from legitimate sources, with the information that needs replacing marked in some sort of bracket. I actually got one where the spammer didn't replace anything, so it was addressed, "Dear {eBay username}". The hint about the capitalization in the subject is excellent. It's true, very few legitimate business-type emails come through with all caps subject lines.

Be smart and stay safe--if you get a suspicious email like this, go to the site that it's supposed to be from (NOT via any link in the email--use a search engine if you don't know the URL), find the help or contact information, and write or call directly to the institution/company.

And, of course, if you did get this and did respond, contact the helpdesk (which is helpdesk@southernct.edu, not supportteam) IMMEDIATELY!

MySCSU downtime Friday morning

MySCSU will be down from 5 am to 8:30 am tomorrow, Friday, July 18. It's the portal itself that they are working on, so this won't block or bounce email--you just won't be able to get at it. Vista and other web services won't be affected.

Vista & Library login server down

Something has happened to a server at the main system office, so you can't login to either Vista or the Library databases. I've got no other info right now, but all the right people have been notified, so someone is working on the problem. Hang in there and keep trying!

Update, 7/9, 9:30 AM: Everything seems to be back up now. No news on what happened so far. Thank you for your patience.