As you may have read recently two critical vulnerabilities in most modern processors have been announced. They are called Meltdown and Spectre. Meltdown only affects Intel processors and there is a patch for our systems that became available shortly after we restarted our systems after last night’s power outage. We will be applying the Meltdown patch tomorrow afternoon, hence an unusual Friday downtime is scheduled. It is unclear when Spectre will be fixed.

An update of coxeter and the mail, web, and public servers will be applied and they will be rebooted starting at approximately 4:15pm tomorrow Friday, January 5. We expect that the servers will be back up around 4:45pm if there are no unforeseen problems.

The departmental mail server will have software updates applied starting at 4:15pm today (Wednesday, January 25, 2017) which will require rebooting.  Since some updates will be applied while the mail server is still up there may be some temporary issues with some software and connectivity.  We hope that any such issues will be minor and by doing most of the upgrading before bringing the mail server 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 mail system to be back up by 4:30pm.

We are aware of a problem where the email system stops allowing connections when it gets busy.  We are investigating this.

    Currently there are many phishing emails which are being sent
to University of Toronto accounts (including departmental
accounts) with the subject line:

        Transaction complete

These emails are originating from compromised University of
Toronto accounts (so the messages appear to be more legitimate
than usual phishing attacks) and are arriving from "utoronto.ca"
addresses.  The message tries to get users to give up their
username and password.

    In our default configuration our spam filter has flagged
every such message sent to our department (they were appearing in
INBOX and SuspectedSpam folders flagged as "SPAM:###", but are
now flagged as "VIRUS DETECTED" and automatically deleted).
Please delete any such messages without opening them.

The mail server will be going down this afternoon at 4:15pm along with the other servers to upgrade the disks.  It should be up by 5pm.

Access to google.com and google.ca seems to be working normally again.