Have jolly and cyber safe time...

The time of the year where we use the word 'jolly' more than any other time of the year is upon us. It is a most wonderful time of the year for sure.

It is also the time when we are shopping! And increasingly we are shopping online. We all like get the boxes at the front door!

I don't like sending messages like this one. They make me feel a lot less jolly and more like a grinch.

When we are shopping online, we are giving different organizations a fair amount of our personal information. Therefore we should all take steps keep our usernames and strong passwords secure. Here are some tips how to do that: Tips for Secure Online Shopping.

In summary this article tells us:

1. Don't shop at a site if you're not comfortable
2. Never click on links from spam emails to make purchases
3. Check the web address to make sure you are on the correct site
4. Check that the site is secure
5. Use a credit card or an online payment service
6. Do not use a public computer to shop online
7. Only use a secure connection when you place your order
8. Use strong passwords

You may also see more email activity afterwards from various companies. Be on the lookout for phishing schemes. Here is some good advice on how to avoid being phish fried: Avoid Phishing Fraud. 

Maybe to help us sort through this a bit further, John Nunnally provided an analysis of how to deal with a real example that was recently received by people at Harding.'

Please take some time to take a look at this example.

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No links! It Must Be Safe…. Wrong.

Phishing Scheme – Analysis, Case 1: Remittance Advice

Here is a message recently received by a person at Harding:

At first glance this looks legitimate. But looking closer:

• Do we know anyone named Charlotte Allison?  That would be the first question.  If not, we should go no further until we check.
• Look at the from address:  charlotteanderson@wellsfargo.com.  Have you been doing any business with Wells Fargo?  Instead of that stopping us, we have a tendency to open the attachment to see why in the world Wells Fargo would be sending us something.  BAD IDEA!  That is exactly the reaction the scammers want you to have.
• If you simply hover your mouse pointer over the attachment without clicking, you can see that it is named “Secure Remittance.htm”.  HTM files are executable web programs.  So if you click on this attachment you would most likely be connected to some bogus web site to do you harm.  Another red flag.

And then we should think about this email from the opposite point of view:

• This email is so very generic.  It could be sent to anyone.  There is nothing that specifically references you as the recipient.  It doesn’t even identify the “Intermediary Bank” supposedly involved in this transaction. (it would be most unusual that people at Harding would send an email that said something generic such as ‘Dear User’)
• Surely a message like this would at least provide a phone number to call in case you have questions.  In fact, it encourages you to contact Charlotte Anderson and then provides you with no contact information except replying to the email.
• This scam even warns you in advance that by clicking on the attachment “You will be required to download and authenticate your email client” – So you are warned that you will be installing software on your computer and probably be expected to give away your username and password!  All scams should be so forthright!

So the only safe thing to do with this email -- delete it.

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Even with all this seemingly dire information, all of us in IS&T want to wish you a jolly Christmas and holiday.

Welcome back - Fall 2016

Hello

The people in IS&T would like to welcome everyone to the beginning of the new school year - yes it really has started as we can see from the increase in activity around campus.

Who is New?

IS&T has welcomed some new people over the summer. You may well come in contact with them and see them around. Please say hello and welcome to them when you have a chance.

Beverly Rose

Beverly is the Assistant to the CIO. Beverly had been retired for sometime. Before her temporary retirement, Beverly Directed the Media Center. She is located in Admin 200E.

Bryan Davis

Bryan Davis has joined Client Support & Consulting.  He comes to us with nearly 8 years of IT support experience and COMPTIA certification. You may well talk with Bryan when you call the Help Desk on extn 4440.

Jonathan James

Jonathan has past experience with KATV in Little Rock and Young Avenue Sound in Memphis where he installed analog and digital mixing suites for the Delta Music Institute in Cleveland Mississippi.  His most recent job was with Quality Office Inc serving on the technical repair staff. 

Jonathan welcomes the opportunity to serve you to make your productions and presentations work flawlessly!

Emellia Cline

Emellia is working in the Public Services department, overseeing the Interlibrary Loan services.  Emellia came to us from working at the Crystal Bridges Museum library.

Dr Diana Tepe

Diana has a Doctor of Education in Instructional Design from the University of Memphis. She has taken the role of Lead Instructional Designer. She has worked for a number of years developing and delivering on-ground, online and computer-based instruction courses. She has also taught for five years at the University of Memphis.

Pokemon Go

Yes, it is happening on campus. There are Pokestops and Pokemon Gyms around the campus. No doubt you will see many (students, faculty and staff) walking around with phones out and stopping occasionally to capture a Pokemon or stock up their supplies at Pokestops.

I predicted that this would inspire some to find a way to use the Pokemon concept for an educational use. Here is one such example that I was shown: Pokemon Go and Geography Lessons

Who knows, by the time the Technology Showcase comes around, there may be lures set up at the showcase venues!

Pipeline

The redesigned and rebuilt Pipeline is now LIVE! We have received a lot of helpful feedback. Thank you all who sent feedback. It is appreciated. We are working through that feedback and will address what we can as soon as we can.

A couple of things to note:

• There is a video that highlights some of the features and operation of the new Pipeline - Pipeline Video
• It is very mobile friendly
• There is a Favorites option. This is useful for you to bookmark the options you use most often.
• When you open up a bar eg Academic, Administrative, Personal etc you will see a list of options (they are in alphabetical order). After you click on a menu option you will see a star at the top right of that option. Click on that star at it will be saved as one of your favorites.
• The Favorites can be accessed by clicking on Favorites, right above the menu bars:

Summer Highlights

Summer is always a very busy time for many in IS&T. Here are some of the highlights of what has been happening in IS&T:

• Replaced 760 PCs. This meant setting up new machines, delivering the new machines, retrieving the old machines, cleaning the hard drives and, packing and shipping them back to the leasing company.
• Conducted numerous training programs, including at our campuses in Memphis and Rogers.
• Selected Ritter to provide our phone trunks. These should be up and running by mid-September. Ritter brought a number of benefits with the phone trunks including local and long distance calling. This means after the trunks are installed, we will not need PAC codes and will not be billed for local or long distance calls. HOWEVER, international calls will still require a code and will be billed separately.
• Check out the Libguide to see what is new in the Brackett Library - What's New in the Library
• Public labs and the classrooms have been re-imaged and Windows PCs are now running Windows 10 and Apple PCs running El Capitan
• In addition to normal operations, provided support to: Special Olympics, Home School Graduation, Arkansas Youth Conference, National Youth Conference, Christian Academy Conference, Stampede 1, 2, and 3, Impact, McNair Scholar's Research Presentations, Day of Caring..
• Verizon began the implementation of a Distributed Antenna System on-campus. It is not live as yet, but they are making good progress.
• Kept up with the IT infrastructure side of all the construction projects

Changes to Email

We have been working on making our email safer and more secure. We are introducing these features slowly so not to cause any drastic changes.

The features being implemented will make it much harder for anyone to 'spoof' our harding.edu emails. It will make no difference when we send and receive emails that are directly from or to our harding.edu email address.

However, if someone sends or receives an email from a source other than harding.edu, but makes it look like it is from harding.edu, that mail will come under more scrutiny.

Overall that is a good thing but there maybe some cases where doing this is ok. We have tried to catch those, but if you have emails that you are wanting to send from another source such as a bulk email company, but have it look like it is from harding.edu, please contact John Nunnally (jnunnally@harding.edu) and he can help set you up so your emails will work. Please make sure that there is a legitimate business reason for doing this. The aim of this action is to help keep us more safe and secure in our email system. Thanks.