The capstone of the 17th Security at University of Michigan IT (SUMIT) event series was a thought-provoking presentation and conversation on digital protection of the press and at-risk individuals. In Adventures in Securing At-Risk People, Runa Sandvik and Elodie Vialle talked about their passion for helping journalists do their work securely. Runa Sandvik, founder of Granitt, has been… Read More »
Cyber Monday is a few days away, so it’s imperative that you practice safe cyber habits during the busy shopping season. Beware of deals that seem too good to be true — often they are. Information Assurance provides tips and resources to keep you and your information safe while online.
As part of this fall’s SUMIT series of weekly events, the Education and Engagement team of ITS Information Assurance (IA) presented on how they curate knowledge, develop training, and create awareness for U-M community members to protect themselves and the U. The team of Performance Support Analysts featured “Jen and the Matts” (Jen Wilkerson, Matt Ranville, and Matt… Read More »
Privacy policies can be perplexing! You might have come across them in the footer of websites or in pop-up messages from applications you use on your devices – privacy policies and notices are ubiquitous in the digital world. According to a 2019 Pew Research report, most Americans are asked to agree to a privacy policy at least monthly,… Read More »
Former Estonian President Toomas Hendrik Ilves has planted more than 19,000 trees on his family farm that dates back to the early 1700s. He’s also helped reboot the banking system after a Russian cyber attack on the country he was leading at the time. “The first thing you must understand is – this was a DDOS attack, servers… Read More »
This fall, ITS Information Assurance (IA) continues the tradition of celebrating Cybersecurity Awareness Month with the annual SUMIT series of weekly events hosted by IA’s cybersecurity experts. SUMIT’s online sessions include: Cosign Retirement Drop-in Sessions: Unit IT who manage services that use Cosign authentication can learn how to smoothly transition from Cosign to Shibboleth (SAML or OIDC). Safe… Read More »
The fall 2022 term has begun and ITS Information Assurance (IA) wants everyone to be prepared! As students and faculty get into the excitement of being back on campus and start to settle into the semester, it’s time to remind the U-M community of their shared responsibility to take steps to protect themselves and the university. View and… Read More »
Released over ten years ago, MCommunity recently went through a remarkable transformation! The MCommunity Directory replaced the legacy U-M Online Directory (UMOD) in the summer of 2011. A major driver for the replacement was that UMOD did not support authentication and managing access to U-M resources based on who is affiliated with the university and in what capacity.… Read More »
Remote access protocols allow a computer to talk to remote systems. They allow system administrators to remotely configure, maintain, and manage systems, and provide individuals access to essential applications and data. Since the start of the COVID-19 pandemic, these protocols have provided needed convenience to users and system administrators who depend on off-site connectivity to campus resources. However,… Read More »
U-M classes are overwhelming being taught remotely this semester. This means that some instructors may, for a variety of reasons, wish to record their classes. The Safe Computing website has guidelines for instructors who plan to record class activities. Recordings where students can be identified—from in-person sessions or remote instruction via Zoom, BlueJeans, or any other videoconferencing application—are:… Read More »
ITS Information Assurance is seeing an increase in fraudulent emails that appear to come from U-M deans, employees and offices. These fraudulent emails use a practice known as “spoofing.” Different versions of these emails ask the recipient to: Quickly arrange for gift cards to cover a university expense Reply if you are available Make an immediate wire transfer… Read More »
It is vital that you report actual or suspected IT security incidents as soon as possible so that work can begin to investigate and resolve them. This applies even when you are working from home. A new ITS Information Assurance (IA) video tells you where to report them (security@umich.edu), and describes how IA responds. For more detail about… Read More »
The Information Assurance: Michigan Medicine (IA) team was awarded a Diversity, Equity and Inclusion Innovation Mini-Grant from the Office for Health Equity and Inclusion. With the goal of spreading awareness of the field of cybersecurity and available job opportunities, the IA team developed a two-hour interactive introduction to the field of information assurance. Participants learned about the role… Read More »
Beginning this fall, all students on the Ann Arbor, Dearborn, and Flint campuses are being encouraged to turn on Duo two-factor authentication by January 29. Faculty, staff, student employees, and sponsored affiliates across U-M voluntarily turned on two-factor authentication by this past January with the support of ITS and the overall Michigan IT community. Over 50% of the… Read More »
Technology changes at an ever-increasing rate, almost always outstripping policy, privacy, security, and legal considerations. ITS Information Assurance (IA) collaborates with faculty, researchers, students, and external industry experts to create a forum, Dissonance, for public discourse on the tensions surrounding technology, policy, privacy, security, and law.
A Distributed Denial of Service (DDoS) attack took down a residence hall network switch at the University of Maryland (UMD) over spring break 2018, but it could have been a lot worse without the collaborative threat information sharing partnership of U-M and other universities. 90% of attack traffic blocked “If we hadn’t been using our shared threat intelligence,… Read More »
There’s a new address for reporting phishing emails at U-M: ReportPhish@umich.edu. When you use this new address, you send your phishing report directly to the Information Assurance (IA) staff members who focus on protecting the university community from phishing. They can quickly check your report and then add that information to the anti-phishing tools used to block malicious… Read More »
On January 30, the university held its first Privacy@Michigan symposium. Celebrating the 10th anniversary of International Data Privacy Day, the event featured an interdisciplinary group of U-M faculty and researchers who addressed top privacy-related—and threatening—issues in an era when the very notion has gotten complicated. The event was sponsored jointly by the U-M School of Information (UMSI), and… Read More »
Are you interested in providing anti-phishing education through self-phishing in your unit? If so, be aware that any U-M unit considering such an effort is expected to abide by self-phishing guidelines and norms from Information Assurance (IA). The guidelines are intended to contribute to the success of your anti-phishing efforts and to share IA expertise based in part… Read More »
A group of security and networking experts across ITS met recently to ensure U-M is prepared for potential distributed denial-of-service (DDoS) attacks.