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Have you received an email about financial or retirement planning?  

As reported by Inside Iowa State, many university faculty and staff have recently received email messages offering financial or retirement planning services, from a sender named “Alexa Brown.” However, these messages are not connected with or endorsed by the university.

These messages offer consultations about topics that include retirement income and Medicare coverage. The messages also refers to recipients as “valued employee[s] of Iowa State University.”

March 25, 2022, 10:55 a.m. (ITS page updated)

Okta has confirmed that Iowa State accounts were not affected as part of their security compromise. The ITS Security team also reviewed Okta account activity logs and also came to the same conclusion. The team has concluded its investigation into this incident and does not plan to provide any additional updates. 

March 23, 2022, 9:40 a.m. (ITS page updated)

Okta posted update on their website.

With numerous high-profile cases making recent headlines, ransomware may seem like a new phenomenon. That's only half right. The threats criminals are making are relatively new, but the methods they're using to breach computers are old standbys, the head of ISU's cybersecurity team told the Professional and Scientific Council at its Nov. 3 meeting.

Read the full story on Inside Iowa State

Before the pandemic, only 17 of Iowa State's largest classrooms were outfitted to record and livestream audio and video. As of this fall, all 214 general university classrooms have a video camera system, a rapid adoption of lecture capture technology that's especially useful for hybrid and virtual instruction.

Read the full article on Inside Iowa State.

The days of a king or queen from a faraway land sending tremendous riches for responding to an email with your bank account number are not as numerous. It's not because scammers have gone away. They are just more sophisticated.

Read the full article on Inside Iowa State.

On December 13, 2020, the IT security team learned that one of Iowa State University’s software vendors, SolarWinds, experienced a security breach. It has been confirmed that Iowa State University was one of the estimated 18,000 customers affected by the SolarWinds security breach.

Information Technology Services (ITS), in partnership with communications colleagues across campus, successfully delivered a robust communications campaign throughout October, encouraging student Cyclones to activate multifactor authentication (MFA). As of November 13, all Iowa State students had been activated.

November 25, 2020 Update 

Iowa State University Information Technology Services (ITS) has entered the second phase of multifactor authentication (MFA) implementation and will begin enrolling students this fall, with a target of having all students registered by the end of spring semester 2020.

Rich Tener, an Iowa State University alumnus and long-time IT security practitioner, has been named Information Technology Services’ (ITS) new Director of Information Security. 

In his new role, Tener will be responsible for the leadership and strategic direction of the information security arm of ITS, supporting university operations, identifying vulnerabilities, protecting against hacking and phishing attempts, and finding ways to keep the campus community’s information safe in the digital environment. 

As part of an effort that will help protect university information and personal data from security breaches, Iowa State University Information Technology Services (ITS) recently completed a campaign to enroll faculty and staff into its new Okta Multifactor Authentication (MFA) protocol.

As part of Information Technology Services' (ITS) continued efforts to improve customer service and security, Iowa State University’s Data Center will undergo a network redesign over the next three years. The change will better protect user data and more closely align the Data Center with industry best practices.

The modifications to the existing network will provide a formalized automated process, additional security, and the ability to easily add next generation firewall services.

Less than a year after the implementation of identity and access security platform Okta, the Iowa State University community has experienced a nearly 50 percent decrease in the number of staff and student accounts compromised by phishing, following a seven-year high in 2017.  

When it comes to knowledge about the cybersecurity realm and ways to keep technology safe, you would be hard pressed to find a better resource on Iowa State University’s campus than Doug Jacobson. As a professor of electrical and computer engineering and the director of the ISU Information Assurance Center, Jacobson teaches network security and information warfare, and has written a textbook on network security.

An email-based extortion scam claiming possession of explicit personal information is circulating around Iowa State, and University account holders are encouraged to strengthen their security measures to prevent being targeted.

Several Iowa State University accounts were recently compromised and used to send emails to other members of the university community, asking them to visit various websites where they were prompted to enter Net-IDs and passwords.

The incident that took place throughout last week was a phishing attack, which is an attempt to obtain sensitive information such as usernames and passwords disguised as trustworthy electronic communication.