Communications

Wednesday, November 23, 2022

To the campus community,

The close of the first work month to be affected by a major upgrade to the Sail interface is quickly approaching.

To help ensure that faculty and staff are able to easily report work and leave time for November in the enhanced Sail environment, as well as to ensure that supervisors can easily review and approve submitted leave reports and time sheets, the following instruction guides are available:

• Leave Reporting and Time Entry
• Work and Leave Time Approval

After viewing these detailed guides, those with questions or concerns about Sail's improved reporting and approval processes should contact the Payroll Department.

Wednesday, November 16, 2022

To the campus community,

We are urging all students, faculty and staff to be aware of and vigilant in avoiding a recent influx of phishing scams involving shared Google Drive resources such as documents, spreadsheets and PDF files.

Upon receiving standard notifications from Google that a resource has been shared with them, recipients of these attack messages are asked to provide their NetID credentials to gain access. The following tips can help prevent recipients from falling prey to these phishing attempts.

• Never provide sensitive information such as passwords or Duo authentication codes via a Google document or form.
• Never attempt to access shared resources unless they are expected and provided by a known colleague.
• Report suspicious or unexpected messages as phishing in webmail using the process documented in UTS’ Phish Tank.

Anyone concerned about having mistakenly attempted to gain access to a fraudulently shared Google resource should change their NetID password at netid.oakland.edu and immediately notify University Technology Services at uts@oakland.edu.

Those wishing to learn more about these and other phishing attacks are encouraged to visit the Fresh Phish section of Phish Tank. Faculty and staff are also encouraged to complete OU’s Security Awareness Training.

We appreciate the awareness, cooperation and vigilance of students, faculty and staff striving to keep the campus community safe from cyber attacks.

Sincerely,

Bhavani Koneru
Chief Information Officer

Tuesday, August 2, 2022

Colleagues,

In conjunction with ongoing efforts to protect sensitive institutional information, University Technology Services (UTS) will soon conduct phishing awareness campaigns involving all faculty and staff.

These campaigns will simulate email attacks by malicious senders. Unlike real world attacks, however, messages will not pose a security risk to sensitive information.

In the event you interact with a UTS phishing awareness email – by clicking on a link, for example – you will be redirected to a secure site that provides feedback on how to better identify and avoid falling prey to malicious emails.

To prepare yourself to appropriately respond to both simulated and actual information security threats, we would like to encourage you to complete the 4-minute Email and Phishing Training module of OU's Security Awareness Training if you haven’t already done so. You can access it using your NetID username and password.

We appreciate your participation in this important security initiative.

Sincerely,

Bhavani Koneru
Chief Information Officer

Tuesday, July 12, 2022

Colleagues,

Protecting Oakland University's institutional information – including human resources, student, personal, research and academic data – continues to be a top priority.

Studies show that 85% or more of data breaches occur as a result of responses to deceptive messaging attacks such as phishing and social engineering. In order to mitigate this threat, University Technology Services (UTS) wants to ensure that you have access to resources that allow you to protect both the institution and yourself in a digitally connected world.

As part of our multi-year security initiative, UTS is excited to share that we have partnered with SANS, an industry leading training vendor, to make Security Awareness Training available to all faculty and staff. This highly focused, self-paced training takes about an hour to complete and can be managed in increments of as little as three minutes.

You can access Security Awareness Training using your NetID username and password at https://oakland.litmos.com.

We appreciate your participation in this important security initiative.

Sincerely,

Bhavani Koneru
Chief Information Officer

Thursday, October 28, 2021

Colleagues,

Protecting Oakland University's institutional information – including human resources, student, personal, research and academic data – continues to be a top priority.

In order to meet our information security obligations and, particularly, to address the growing and continuously evolving threat of cyber attacks, we are preparing to take a major step forward with multi-factor authentication (MFA).

Starting this fall, we will expand current use of the Duo MFA sign-on process to include all faculty and staff and all university sign-on services, including Webmail and MySail. This change will significantly increase our protection from unauthorized access by requiring a level of user verification beyond simply entering one's password.

Those of you already using Duo MFA will not need to take action other than to begin using this sign-on process as it is made available for additional online services. Those of you unfamiliar with Duo MFA will need to enroll in order to utilize it. The UTS Duo Enrollment Quick Start Guide explains how.

At this time, the university's Duo MFA licensing is limited to faculty and staff. As such, we ask you to not share application links or information with the student community.

Thank you in advance for your participation in this critical security upgrade. Please rest assured that UTS will provide additional information as we get closer to the Duo MFA expansion implementation date, which we plan to share with you soon.

Sincerely,

Bhavani Koneru
Chief Information Officer