&We have lately seen a spike in what is an increasingly common and frustration problem: email spoofing.

If you’ve ever gotten one of those message: undeliverable bounce-back emails, and noticed that it is for a message you most certainly did not send, then you’ve most likely been the target of spoofing.

Basically, spoofing is simply sending out a message from John Smith’s email account, and then editing it to seem like it came from Bob Smith instead – this is unfortunately quite easy to do, and is thus a favorite tactic of spammers to cover their tracks and make it harder to pin them down. It does not require hacking into your account or knowing your password – they only need to know the email address itself.

In most cases, you will see many of these messages come in at once – usually anywhere from 3-50 or so. This likely means your account was spoofed to spam a large list, probably several thousand messages to a certain domain. Those messages will appear to come from you even though they are not, and the bounce-back emails you get are from invalid addresses on whichever list was used.

Luckily, spammers will typically use a different account to spoof every time, so it’s generally an infrequent if incredibly annoying problem.

Unfortunately, there is almost nothing that can be done to prevent spoofing given the current design of email (not a CC-specific design, but the design of email in general).

This also means you should be wary of all email, even if it appears to come from someone you trust. Most spam messages have warning signs which are easily identified, so there’s no need to be paranoid – just don’t trust an email 100% if it’s from someone you know without taking a closer look at it.

Here is a great article explaining the problem of spoofing in more depth (including some proposed solutions to the problem), we highly recommend taking a look:
http://www.windowsecurity.com/articles/Email-Spoofing.html

Though spoofing is by far the most common, there are other possible causes for phony emails, such as a legitimate hacking attempt or a virus infection – as a precaution, if you see messages like this, we recommend you change your password to something a bit more secure (instructions here:
http://helpdesk.coloradocollege.edu/index.php/tips-and-how-to/miscellaneous/change-your-password/) and run a full virus scan on your computer when it’s convenient - just to make sure.

We’d like to announce that we’re expanding on the services we offer to students at the Help Desk.  Over time and even with normal use, computers accumulate a lot of “baggage” that slows them down and otherwise interferes with their operability – most commonly, this takes the form of spyware / adware / as well as different viruses and trojans.

We provide instructions for helping to keep computers clean of these problems on our website here: http://helpdesk.coloradocollege.edu/index.php/tips-and-how-to/protect-your-computer/ but have been unable to assist students with these problems because it is so time consuming and we don’t have enough staff to handle the load.

Starting now, we are offering help “tuning up” computers to rid them of problems and otherwise get them to perform as fast as possible during the Help Desk night shift (6:00 pm to midnight most nights). We are still not able to offer this service during the day, but our night shift folks will be happy to help you tune up your computer.  Stop by after 6:00 and give it a shot!

&Our block 7 electronics recycling day is scheduled for this Wednesday, April 2nd.

We invite you to bring any and all electronic equipment you’d like to responsibly dispose of to the Barnes loading dock between 8:00 am and 11:00 am on the morning of the 27^th.  If you cannot make it during that time, you can also bring your items to the Help Desk (Tutt Library room 13) any time today.

We’ll accept any kind of electronics for recycling at the Barnes loading dock on these recycling days, including personally owned equipment – computers, printers, faxes, cell phones, batteries, speakers, radios, etc.  You can bring monitors as well, though we charge $10 each for monitors (because that’s what the company charges us).  You only need to pay the $10 if it’s a personally owned monitor, we have a budget that takes care of CC-owned monitors.

If no one is there to accept your check when you drop off your personally owned monitor, please slip it under the door of Barnes 212.

The next scheduled electronics recycling day is April 30^th.

&As many of you know, we’ve had some trouble with our computer registration system recently.  Either you, or someone else in your area has likely experienced problems with computer registration.  The symptom of this problem is the inability access email, network drives, network printers, internet, etc.

To fix it, computers with this issue simply need to re-register.  To do so, open an internet browser (Internet Explorer, Firefox, Safari, etc.), and you should automatically be redirected to the registration page, and can follow the on-screen instructions.  You may get a notification about a security certificate – if so, just say “yes”, “continue”, “accept”, or the equivalent option.  The entire process takes less than 3 minutes.

To be clear, you do not need to re-register unless you are experiencing problems with your network connection – please help us spread the word to those who cannot read this email and need to re-register.  =)

Background information:

A couple years ago we implemented a system called Bradford Network Access Control, which requires every device connecting to the network to go through a registration process before it will be allowed to connect to network resources.  This system allows us to know about what is connected as well as secure our network against intrusive viruses and other malware.

Late last week, the Bradford server had a hardware failure and broke down, switching over to its backup.  Unfortunately, the switch did not go smoothly and a number of registrations and configurations were lost in the process.  Since then, we’ve gotten the main server back online, and it has solved a lot of problems, but there are still a number of lost registrations that need to be cleaned up.

We’re also working with Bradford on how we can make sure something like this doesn’t happen in the future.

Thank you for your patience as Block 7 begins!

We wanted to remind you that many network services will be down for some or all of the morning today, Friday March 14th, including the following:

* Email (we’re doing a lot of email maintenance this time, so it will definitely be down for most of the morning).
* Internet access
* Networked printers
* Fileservers (H:, I:, W: drives, etc.)
* The CC website
* C3PO
* Banner
* Cognos

These services will be up and down at different points in the morning, but everything should be done by 12:00 noon.

You may also want to note on your calendars that our next scheduled maintenance day is Friday, May 30th.

Also, you may have seen a notice earlier this afternoon about an Events-L Digest. You can ignore that message (it was a test), but look for more information in the near future about Events-L. Basically, we’d like to funnel the majority of digest postings onto this list, since they are events which apply to the whole CC community, and keep the other lists (Student-L, Faculty-L, and Staff-L) shorter, cleaner, and with more pertinent information for each constituency.

Happy Spring Break to everyone! We’re switching to our spring break hours today, which are as follows:

Wednesday: 8:00 AM – Noon
Thursday: 8:00 AM – 5:00 PM
Friday: 8:00 AM – 5:00 PM
Saturday: CLOSED
Sunday: CLOSED

Monday 8:00 AM – 5:00 PM
Tuesday 8:00 AM – 5:00 PM
Wednesday 8:00 AM – 5:00 PM
Thursday 8:00 AM – 5:00 PM
Friday 8:00 AM – 5:00 PM
Saturday CLOSED
Sunday CLOSED

&Recycling
Our block 6 electronics recycling day is scheduled for tomorrow, February 27th.

We invite you to bring any and all electronic equipment you’d like to responsibly dispose of to the Barnes loading dock between 8:00 am and 11:00 am on the morning of the 27^th. If you cannot make it during that time, you can also bring your items to the Help Desk (Tutt Library room 13) any time today.

We’ll accept any kind of electronics for recycling at the Barnes loading dock on these recycling days, including personally owned equipment – computers, printers, faxes, cell phones, batteries, speakers, radios, etc. You can bring monitors as well, though we charge $10 each for monitors (because that’s what the company charges us). You only need to pay the $10 if it’s a personally owned monitor, we have a budget that takes care of CC-owned monitors.

If no one is there to accept your check when you drop off your personally owned monitor, you can slip it under the door of Barnes 212.

The next scheduled electronics recycling day is April 2^nd.

Wireless

We’d also like to remind you that the old wireless network, ‘coloradocollege’ will be taken offline on Tuesday, May 20^th. If you’re still connecting to the old ‘coloradocollege’ network instead of the new ‘tigernet2’ network, we recommend you switch over sooner rather than later. Instructions for doing so can be found here: Instructions for switching to the new wireless, or we would be happy to assist you at the Help Desk – just bring your laptop in!

Contact us via instant messenger!

The Help Desk now uses instant messenger as a means of contact. Our AIM address is ComputerHelpAtCC, or MSN messenger at HelpDesk@Coloradocollege.edu. For even more convenience, you can IM us directly from the Help Desk website without having to install and use an IM client on your computer! Check it out at: http://helpdesk.coloradocollege.edu/index.php/submit-a-problem-online/

&We know the past few weeks have been frustrating with a number of partial network & system outages – thank you for bearing with us! Now that we have identified solutions to those events, we thought it might be helpful to describe what happened for anyone who is interested.

There have been 4 distinct problems:

1) Bad optics. All network ports in the wall to which you actually plug in a networked device (including wireless access points) eventually connect back to a network switch in the building. These switches each have many ports and handle all the incoming and outgoing network traffic for everything connected to them (incidentally, these switches are the main thing we replaced in the network upgrade).

In addition to all the ports, these switches are each connected via fiber optic cable to the main core of the network via a piece that translates the signal from the fiber optic cable into the switch. This piece is called an “optic,” and if it fails, that entire switch goes down. Along with a few other newer network installations at other sites, Colorado College has seen multiple cases of bad optics within the last month, and we’ve used all our spares getting buildings back online. We have negotiated with our vendor to replace the known bad optics, and the spares, and we have begun discussing a full-scale proactive replacement plan for Colorado College.

2) Spanning tree. The switches we referred to above are intelligent in that they actively direct and shape all the myriad traffic coming through them at any given moment. This intelligence is controlled by software installed on the switches, and in one instance recently that software had a malfunction which interfered with the direction of network traffic (this caused a network outage in most of the northeast side of campus). We uninstalled a piece of this software that was causing the issue so this problem shouldn’t happen again. Our vendor is working on an upgraded version of code that will fix this vulnerability in the long run.

3) Server was hacked. A hacker exploited a vulnerability in one of our servers (acad.coloradocollege.edu), and once they had taken control of the server, they used it to mess up our network from the inside by sending a number of attacks from this server to all our other servers. We took the hacked server offline and are copying over its many functions to other servers while we work on rebuilding it and making sure the vulnerability is patched up.

4) Bad hard drive in email server. The most recent partial outage occurred monday afternoon. One of the many hard drives in our email server failed, causing the server to run slowly as it attempted to recover from the loss of a hard drive. We took the bad drive out and replaced it with a new one, and it is running okay now (there’s no particular reason for this other than the fact that parts occasionally go bad, and all we can do is replace them as soon as possible).

Overall, our new network is running very well – any large amount of complex technology is going to have its share of problems, and we certainly appreciate your understanding as we work through them as quickly as possible.

On the plus side, items 1-3 above would have caused a campus-wide network outage on the old network, whereas each case was localized to just certain areas in the new network.

Let us know if you have any questions, and we hope you found these explanations informative and helpful.

& As you no doubt have noticed, the email server which houses staff email accounts is running very slowly right now.  A part failed in the server, which we’ve already replaced, but it takes processing power to re-integrate it which is causing the performance issues (however, slowness is better than it being down completely).

The slowness should last about an hour (i.e. until approximately 4:15).

We apologize for the inconvenience, and we do recognize the irony of sending you an email about email problems, but hope it reaches some of you so you can pass along the word!

&  We completed the wired and wireless network upgrade at the end of summer in 2007.  Most of you are now connected to and happily using the new wireless network “tigernet2.”  We left the old wireless network “coloradocollege” active for now to allow plenty of time to help folks transition to the new wireless.  This migration process has been going well, and so we’ve decided on an end date for the old wireless network.

On Tuesday, May 20^th 2008 (the day after commencement), we will be turning off the old “coloradocollege” wireless network.  If you are still connecting to “coloradocollege” on your computer, remember to change over to “tigernet2” sometime this semester.  The process is fairly easy, and we’d recommend doing it sooner rather than later so you don’t have to worry about it.

Note that this only affects on-campus wireless, and thus primarily laptops – it will not affect your wireless connection at off-campus locations.  You can see  which network you’re connected to in Windows XP by hovering your mouse over the wireless network icon in the system tray (lower right, next to the date and time).  A small window will pop up and tell you to which network you are connected.

Online instructions for connecting to the “tigernet2” wireless network can be found here: http://helpdesk.coloradocollege.edu/index.php/connecting-to-cc/wireless.  If you have Windows XP, be sure to refer to the “Remove LEAP configuration from Windows XP” link at the bottom of that page – you’ll need to do that before connecting to “tigernet2.”

Of course, you’re also welcome to come by the Help Desk and we’d be happy to assist you with the transition.