On the 19th of January, students of Southampton University were subjected to a hoax email. The email was spoofed to make it look like it came from the Vice Chancellor and announced exams were cancelled due to the University closing. The statements made in the email were completely false with the intention to cause disruption […]
Author: trish
New phishing attack
Many University staff and students have this morning, reported receiving a phishing email with subject line “Email Validation: University of STIRLING”. This is a screenshot of the email – below we have listed below the characteristics that can help identify it as a scam. Issues from the top down From field – on this occasion […]
Information Security Alert: new phishing threat detected
This morning we have received several reports of a phishing email purporting to be from our Chancellor Jack McConnell. Thanks to those who reported the issue, we were able to act quickly and block the offending email, removing it from a further 413 mailboxes. See below how this was identified as a phishing email. Beware […]
OneDrive: preferred file storage for students
Over the next few months, Information Services is going to be heavily promoting Office 365 and its many exciting technologies to our staff and students. Students already have full access to the Office 365 suite via your student email accounts – just have a look in the App Launcher (top left in your email) to […]
Freshers Week in IS
As always IS staff were heavily involved in making Freshers Week a fun and informative start to semester for our students. We contributed to several events / services to help welcome our new students onto campus. Here are a few of the ways we were out and about: Welcome Desk in the Lochside MarqueeThis year […]
Temporary withdrawal of VPN service
Information Services have been made aware of an industry wide security vulnerability with the VPN service, which enables you to connect to university IT resources from off campus. As a consequence, we are temporarily withdrawing the VPN service while the issue is addressed by vendors. We expect the VPN to be restored early next week […]
Withdrawal of local admin account functionality
As part of our Cyber Essentials accreditation for managed staff desktops, we have recently withdrawn the local admin account functionality from Run Advertised Programs on staff PCs. While the local admin account withdrawal happened more suddenly than we had anticipated, we were planning to remove it from RAP this summer anyway. This is in line […]
Password rules are changing
As part of our ongoing commitment to achieving Cyber Essentials Accreditation, we are strengthening our university network password rules. Our current security settings require a minimum of six characters and staff/PGRs must change their password once a year. It is not possible to use your previous two passwords when changing. In future, your password is going […]
Blue button phishing attack resurfaces
Earlier this week, variants of the blue button phishing email scam were circulated and unfortunately a number of accounts have been compromised as a result. Subsequently, user details including username and password were harvested. In this instance the attacker did not use the harvested details until this afternoon, when it emerged that a number of […]
New scam email….your credit card has been invoiced….
…but of course it hasn’t… We’re starting to see a number of emails being sent to staff with the core message that your credit card has been invoiced to the tune of usually around £1,600. The text in the body of the email so far is completely different between users, the sender email is different […]