New E-Mail Spam Filter

A Barracuda spam appliance is now the UIS front line of defense against email spam, phishing schemes, and viruses.

Since its installation in early March over 15,000,000 pieces of mail have been processed through the new appliance. Less than 1,500,000 pieces, less than 10% of that email has been allowed to flow on to the UIS email servers. The email that gets through to the email servers then goes through Exchange Internet Messaging Filters and McAfee's Groupshield where another 3000 messages are discarded daily.

Current statistics from the Barracuda can be viewed from campus computers on the Spam Activity page on the ITS website.

For those interested in the environmental impact of spam, McAfee in conjunction with ICF international has published an enlightening report called Carbon Footprint of Email Spam [PDF, 2.33MB].

Campus Phone directory on Cisco IP phones

Did you know the corporate directory on your Cisco IP phone now has the list of ALL students, staff and faculty? Well it does, and you can search by first or last name to find the person you need. The information is loaded from Banner daily so it’s very up to date. Not all students have phone numbers associated with their names, in fact most don’t. ITS is working on a way to filter out the names without phone numbers, in an effort to simplify the searches. Even with all the names in the directory the search is fast, give it a try.

One of the challenges with pulling data from banner database tables is that whatever is there is what we get. Not all the information in banner is 100% accurate.

• If you do a search for yourself you can see what phone number is listed for you in banner.
• If the phone number that shows up is not correct then you will need to log into banner and change it. You can do that through the Nessie website, go to Personal Information, then select Employee Information form, there you can change any of your addresses. When you edit the campus address and phone number here it will change in the corporate directory on the phone the following day.
  

Instructions:

1. On your Cisco IP phone press the button labeled directories (the open book) lower right portion of the phone instrument. This has several directories Missed calls, Received calls, Placed calls and Personal directory, all specific to your phone.
2. Last on the list is Corporate directory, this is the directory with all the names and phone numbers. Cursor down to the directory you want and press the select key or you can enter the number listed to the left of the directory.

Security Incident Handler

ITS has developed and implemented a new procedure to guide the campus community in the handling of information technology security incidents. A security incident is the compromise of a computer or data by virus, theft, attack, accident, or other means. The new procedure will help us handle security incidents in a more consistent manner and thorough manner. The new Security Incident Handling Procedure [PDF, 105KB] can be found on the ITS website under UIS IT Policies.