October marks Cybersecurity Awareness Month (CAM), an annual, nationwide initiative dedicated to educating individuals and organizations on how to fortify their digital security. As we ramp up for another academic year, it is a great time to be reminded that cybercriminals can strike from anywhere and ongoing cybersecurity awareness training is important to help us sharpen skills and protect against data breaches, phishing, and other cyber threats.

On January 24, 2024, our IT team identified and stopped an illegal intrusion into the Life Sciences Division IT environment. We believe our actions isolated the unauthorized access to the targeted area, which is 1.19% of the campus community. We have engaged a leading cybersecurity firm to assist in our response and notified the FBI. With their assistance, we are conducting a thorough assessment of the incident, including determining the extent of the impact to servers and data.

As we ramp up for another academic year, it is a great time to be reminded that cybercriminals are all around us and ongoing cybersecurity awareness training is important to help us sharpen skills and protect against data breaches, phishing and other malicious attacks, and other cyber threats.

Confluence Server has been updated and patched; the service is back online. 

We'd like to raise awareness about a serious vulnerability with Google Chrome and Chromium based browsers such as Microsoft Edge. Please see the details below. In short, all affected users need to update and restart the browser to resolve the vulnerability.

Wednesday afternoon, many employees received an email with the subject line “A new version of Burst report is available” along with an attached document. We can assure you that this was not a cyberattack but the result of a mistake during the testing of a new report distribution.