Serious security incident involving the OneClass Easy Invite Chrome Extension

Do not install the Chrome browser plugin called ‘OneClass Easy Invite’.  It can capture usernames and passwords.

Please see the UofT Portal (https://portal.utoronto.ca/) or http://systemstatus.utoronto.ca for more information.

Please see http://uoft.me/cyberaware for information about UofT’s “Information Security Is Everyone’s Responsibility” campaign.

Phishing email with Subject line “Department of Mathematics Activities”

Spammers are trying to phish Departmental usernames and passwords with emails with Subject lines:

Department of Mathematics Activities

The body of the message is:

We just concluded all University of Toronto Department of Mathematics Webmail account upgrade,follow the link below to confirm if your account is active and  upgraded.
http://webadmndesk3.wixsite.com/math-uh-edu-upgrad

Please delete this spam.

Server updates on 2016nov23 were successful

The departmental servers appear to be working fine after the updates.

Updates at 4:15pm on Wednesday November 23, 2016

The departmental servers coxeter, sphere, and the mail, web, share, ptr, and blog/wiki servers will have software updates applied today Wednesday afternoon, November 23, 2016 which will require rebooting (most servers will be unavailable starting at 4:15pm). Since some updates will be applied while the servers are still up there may be some temporary issues with some software. We hope that any such issues will be minor and by doing most of the upgrading before bringing systems down the shorter downtime will be worth the potential minor problems. Please restart any programs if you observe problems during the upgrades (and please let us know at requests@math.toronto.edu, so we can investigate). We expect the systems to be back up by 5:00pm.

 

Phishing email with Subject line “Email Service Alert utoronto.ca”

Spammers are trying to phish UofT UTORids and passwords with emails with Subject lines:

Email Service Alert utoronto.ca

This message is particularly poorly written (at one point the message says to “enter your details incorrectly”) but the main clue that this is spam is that the link is not to the utoronto.ca domain (you can determine the link by hovering on it in most browsers and email clients).  Do NOT click on links that you do not know to be legitimate.  Delete that email.

Server updates on 2016oct26 were successful

The departmental servers appear to be working fine after the updates.

Updates at 4:15pm on Wednesday October 26, 2016

The departmental servers coxeter, sphere, and the mail, web, share, ptr, and blog/wiki servers will have software updates applied today Wednesday afternoon, October 26, 2016 which will require rebooting (most servers will be unavailable starting at 4:15pm). Since some updates will be applied while the servers are still up there may be some temporary issues with some software. We hope that any such issues will be minor and by doing most of the upgrading before bringing systems down the shorter downtime will be worth the potential minor problems. Please restart any programs if you observe problems during the upgrades (and please let us know at requests@math.toronto.edu, so we can investigate). We expect the systems to be back up by 5:00pm.

Server updates on 2016oct05 were successful

The departmental servers appear to be working fine after the updates.

sphere now has the latest version (11.0.1) of Mathematica.

Updates at 4:15pm on Wednesday October 5, 2016

The departmental servers coxeter, sphere, and the mail, web, share, ptr, and blog/wiki servers will have software updates applied today Wednesday afternoon, October 5, 2016 which will require rebooting (most servers will be unavailable starting at 4:15pm). Since some updates will be applied while the servers are still up there may be some temporary issues with some software. We hope that any such issues will be minor and by doing most of the upgrading before bringing systems down the shorter downtime will be worth the potential minor problems. Please restart any programs if you observe problems during the upgrades (and please let us know at requests@math.toronto.edu, so we can investigate). We expect the systems to be back up by 5:00pm.

Also Mathematica on sphere will be upgraded to version 11.0.1 during this time.  If you use Mathematica please check that your code continues to function as you expect.

Greylisting

Our email system now greylists incoming email from many sites.  Currently we only delay for one minute but that may change as we adjust things to minimize spam.  We have a number of greylisting exceptions and if there is a particular site that you would like to be exempt from greylisting please let us know at requests@math.toronto.edu.