DOIT Newsletter - Fall 2017

DoIT and Academic Technology Services (ATS) are jointly piloting a virtual computer lab for students. The virtual computer lab will allow our students to access campus-licensed software programs anytime, anywhere as long as there is a connection to the internet. Many of these software programs are too expensive for students to purchase on their own, but students need them to complete coursework and class assignments. We will offer the following core campus licensed software programs via the virtual computer lab in the first phase of the project:

• ArcGIS
• Microsoft Office
• MATLAB
• Minitab
• SPSS
• SAS

DoIT and the Office of Research and Sponsored Programs (ORSP) partnered to develop the Faculty Research Experience and Expertise (FREE) system, which is a searchable electronic database that includes research experience and expertise of faculty at CSULB. The purpose of the FREE system is to foster research collaborations and partnerships among faculty at CSULB, colleagues at other educational institutions, industry partners, and government agencies. The FREE database also helps students identify their potential mentors to conduct research projects.

DoIT would like to remind the campus about the Single Sign-On (SSO) service available to the entire campus community.

SSO allows access to multiple campus technology services by logging in once at a single URL (https://sso.csulb.edu) using your campus user name and password (BeachID credentials). Once logged into SSO, access to services is available based on your campus role (student, faculty, staff) and allows you to select from available "chiclets" (clickable icon) without having to login multiple times.

DoIT has been steadily adding more services into SSO. For example, commonly used employee forms are now available through the Forms chiclet. The Forms chiclet not only provides employees with quick access to common forms, it also helps limit access to these internal forms to only employees. Also, new chiclets are now available in SSO for the three MyCSULB service centers:

• Student Center
• Faculty Center
• Employee Center

With these new chiclets in place, the MyCSULB log in page is no longer needed and has been retired. For your convenience, MyCSULB links and bookmarks will reroute to the SSO log-in page. For sample screenshots, you may reference the following CSULB Knowledge Base article MyCSULB Service Centers.

As part of the Smart Campus Initiative, DoIT is partnering with a number of campus units to pilot the use of DocuSign as a digital signature solution for digitizing some of our paper-driven workflows.  The aim of the project is to reduce time required to route paper forms and reduce the use of paper. The pilot participants of the digital signature project include Enrollment Services, Student Affairs, CCPE, and College of Natural Sciences and Mathematics.

The digital signage project is also part of the Smart Campus Initiative. The objective of this project is to create a shared technology platform for managing digital signs and message boards on campus. Leveraging our enterprise infrastructure, the shared digital signage platform will enable campus units, offices, and departments to implement and manage their digital signs and displays from their computers. In the event of an emergency, the shared digital platform can be used to broadcast alerts and messages to the campus community and help coordinate emergency management.

An important component of the Smart Campus Initiative, the one-card solution will create a secure campus-wide access and transaction management system.  A system of this nature can automate physical access to offices, classrooms, buildings, and other campus facilities using campus ID card swipes, a mobile app, or biometric information. In addition, the system can process other selected campus services and transactions such as riding shuttle buses, paying for meal plans, bookstore purchases, and possibly purchases from other vendors on and around the campus.

Endorsed by the Office of Sponsored Programs (ORSP) and partnering with campus researchers, DoIT is building a High Performance Computing (HPC) environment to meet faculty research needs and assist students focusing on research and innovation in mathematics, science and engineering where substantial computational capacity is required. We expect that the HPC cluster will be deployed in the next few months.

Per recent media reports, cyber criminals have successfully gained access to sensitive information at Equifax, one of the three major credit-reporting firms in the nation.

Equifax and other credit bureaus collect personal and financial data for millions of consumers and businesses worldwide. For further information about the data breach, visit the U.S. Federal Trade Commission Equifax Data Breach, What to Do web page. Information on what to do to abort identity theft is available at https://identitytheft.gov/.

This security compromise will likely result in increased email phishing attempts designed to trick us into divulging university or personal email credentials (i.e., login IDs and passwords).

We urge you to be cautious, and never click unknown links in emails you receive. Never provide your personal or financial information to anyone who solicits this information by phone or email. Please visit the campus phishing reports page www.csulb.edu/phishing to confirm current known phishing attempts. You may also forward suspicious email to alert@csulb.edu.

Last May, 2017, a widespread ransomware campaign affected organizations worldwide, with reports of infections in over 150 countries, including the United States, United Kingdom, Spain, Russia, Taiwan, France, and Japan. The software, nicknamed “WannaCry”, was essentially a very successful phishing campaign and requested ransom of .1781 bitcoins, roughly $300 U.S.

Our campus had no reported incidents resulting from WannaCry, however in the future should you fall victim to ransomware, the campus Safe Computing Site has information about what to do, such as:

1. Keep all of the software on your computer up to date.
2. Don’t open spam email messages or click links on suspicious websites. You may visit the campus Phishing Reports page to confirm current known phishing attempts. You may also forward suspicious mail to alert@csulb.edu.
3. Use a reputable antivirus and anti-malware program, and keep it up to date.
4. Minimize storing important work on your computer’s local hard drive, or store it on campus provided file shares which are secured and backed up on a regular basis. ITS has deployed 2 gigabytes of individual, centrally supported storage to every faculty and staff member on campus.
5. For personally owned computers, make frequent backups of your important files.