News Bulletin Archive

Infrastructure Bulletin

Hess Hall Construction Causes Intermittenet Network Connectivity
Posted: Tuesday, May 20th, 2008

Due to construction in Hess Hall over the summer, network connectivity in the J and K wings will be intermittent.

Security Bulletin

Recent e-mail scams
Posted: Thursday, January 17th, 2008

To: UT Knoxville Area Faculty, Staff and Students
From: Information Security Officer Robert Ridenour
Subject: Recent e-mail scams

UT Knoxville Area faculty, staff and students have been the target of two e-mail scams this week. Both e-mails attempt to appear as official university communication from the Office of Information Technology and request that the user to reply with their e-mail password. In one case, the e-mail requests the user's date of birth and office location as well.

Please do not respond to these requests. The subject lines of these two scams are as follows:

"Confirm Your E-mail Address"

"VERIFY YOUR UTK EMAIL ACCOUNT NOW"

We recognize that it can be difficult to determine whether an email is legitimate. UT will never request your password by e-mail or by telephone.

It's important to note that the From address of an email can easily be made to appear to come from anyone. Hackers often exploit this characteristic of e-mail to fool users into trusting the origin of the e-mail. When you click Reply to one of these messages, the e-mail address often will change to the real address of the attacker.

In the two cases this week, the From address appeared to come from UT while the Reply-To addresses were non-UT accounts.

Please note that the only official communications you will receive from UT's Office of Information Technology about your accounts are routine prompts to change your NetID password. Those messages, however, will take you to a designated OIT Web page that will require your password information. Exchange users may also be contacted by OIT regarding their e-mail storage quota, but these messages will not ask for any login information.

If you have questions about this information, please call the OIT HelpDesk at 974-9900.

Members of the university community are encouraged to be aware of issues related to phishing and other Internet scams. The Office of Information Technology always will have the latest security information and updates available on the Traffic Center Web site at http://oit.utk.edu/tc. More specific information about phishing scams can be found at http://security.tennessee.edu/phishing.shtml.

More Information...

Security Bulletin

Telephone Scams
Posted: Wednesday, November 21st, 2007

Knoxville is currently the target for an automated phone-based internet scam.  The message will be an automated warning stating that your banking information is out-of-date and you need to log onto a reasonable sounding website (in one case a Regions banking-like URL). This a social networking SCAM intended to get your private banking information.  Please be aware that any automated phone calls that request personal information should be regarded as highly suspicious.

Infrastructure Bulletin

Network Infrastructure Upgrades
Posted: Friday, November 2nd, 2007

Network Services will be upgrading network hardware in many buildings between November and January. There will be a 30 minute network interruption for those buildings during the upgrade process. Specific notices will be sent out a week before the work is done. The following is a list of the buildings where the work will take place:

Please contact the OIT Helpdesk at 974-9900 with any problems concerning this event.

Network Services would like to take this opportunity to remind the user community of the regularly scheduled network maintenance window every Wednesday night from 10:00pm till 2:00am.

Email Bulletin

Migrate from Webmail to Tmail
Posted: Monday, August 20th, 2007

UT is moving to a new email system called Tmail. You will find some great features in Tmail that weren't available in previous e-mail software. If you are still using WebMail to access your UT email, you can migrate to Tmail to take advantage of the new functionality. We have made this very easy to do. Just go to https://oit.utk.edu/exchange/migrate/ to schedule a date to be migrated.

Email Bulletin

Cingular Service
Posted: Monday, June 4th, 2007

Cingular service was disrupted today due to a carrier switch software upgrade. This will affect all Cingular blackberry devices. The Knoxville area Cingular engineers are aware of the problem and working to correct the issue. This outage encompassed the entire Knoxville downtown area, not just the UT Knoxville campus. Service outside the downtown area is fully operational. The service is expected to be operational later this afternoon / evening. We will pass on more information when available.

Email Bulletin

Power Outage 05/17/07
Posted: Tuesday, May 22nd, 2007

At approximately 5:04am on Thursday, May 17th, there was a campus-wide power outage, presumably caused by a problem or work that KUB was doing. After 8 seconds running on batteries, we were running on generator power. Sometime around 6:19am, KUB fixed their problem and utility power was restored. When the automatic switchgear transferred from the generator back to utility power, the main circuit breaker supplying power to the SMC UPS tripped. This circuit breaker is part of the SMC building electrical switchgear to which we have no access. After approximately 12 minutes (at 6:32am), the batteries on the UPS were totally discharged so the UPS shutdown and dropped the load. OIT got in contact with Facilities to try and determine what the problem was. At approximately 7:21am, Facilities found the tripped circuit breaker and reset it, restoring power to the UPS and all the servers located at SMC. The power outage caused a disruption to all of the central OIT email servers. OIT is working with Facilities to try to figure out why the main circuit breaker to the UPS tripped. We've gone though this cycle many, many times before (any time there is power interruption to SMC) and this has not happened before.

Email Bulletin

Welcome to the Email Traffic Center
Posted: Friday, March 2nd, 2007

To accommodate our growing user environment and improve communication and collaboration between members of the university community, OIT is in the process of making many improvements to university email. Throughout this process of growth and transition, some of the changes we are implementing may result in problems for our users. OIT is strongly dedicated to solving our users IT problems quickly and efficiently. The Email Traffic Center is designed to keep our users informed about problems that arise and expedite problem reporting and resolution.