Fairleigh Dickinson University has recently experienced an uptick in compromised email accounts being used to send spam email, including phishing attempts. To combat this, the university has implemented rate limits on email sent from FDU email accounts.

Starting September 22, FDU faculty and staff email accounts will be able to send a maximum of:

• 500 messages per hour to FDU email addresses
• 200 messages per hour to external email addresses
• 1,000 messages per day

Please note that this limit is based not only on the number of messages that you compose and send, but also the number of recipients. A message sent to 5 recipients would act as 5 messages toward your daily limit.  

If you require the ability to send email to large groups, please request the creation of a distribution group by submitting the Distribution Group/Shared Mailbox Request located on forms.fdu.edu. With a distribution group, a faculty or staff member can use a single email address to send a message to a preset group of users. An email sent to a distribution group counts as a single message towards the FDU email address hourly limit and the daily limit, regardless of the number of recipients. 

If the number of messages sent exceeds any of these thresholds, the account will be locked and the faculty or staff member will need to contact the University Technical Assistance Center at (973)-443-8822 to have it unlocked. Thank you for your attention to this matter.

To help navigate the multitude of IT tools available to our community, FDU OIRT offers the comprehensive IT.FDU.EDU website. You may be familiar with this site as a vast index of over 200 tutorial, how-to and troubleshooting articles, and all the Forms necessary to request just about anything offered from the Office of Information Resource Technology. IT.FDU.EDU should be your first stop for acquainting yourself with our most used IT resources such as

FDU NetID, Cisco Duo and Microsoft Teams. In addition to the articles and forms, our goal is to make IT.FDU.EDU your starting point for everything related to the university’s IT resources. Can’t remember the URL for the FDU VPN or Office 365? We have you covered with a shortcuts link in the top right corner of the screen.

Want to see if a service is currently down? We thought of that too. IT.FDU.EDU has a System Status section to inform the community of any downtime on our wired and wireless network, our web applications, and even our on-campus printers.

To get you up to speed on the multi-faceted utility of IT.FDU.EDU, we composed a brisk 36-minute video called Getting the Most out of IT.FDU.EDU.

I strongly recommend investing a bit of time in learning the IT.FDU.EDU website. Experiencing an IT issue can be stressful, especially right before an important exam or meeting. Having the ability to get answers quickly and independently is a massive advantage which could prove to be invaluable.

This morning, OIRT is upgrading the Sophos software on FDU owned Microsoft Windows computers to Sophos Central for Bitlocker Management.  While this software is being installed on your PC without any action required on your part, we ask that you take a moment to review the updated information below.

Our goal is to provide our community with as safe and protected a computing environment as possible. This upgrade will enhance our community’s device security and user experience by:

• Simplifying and improving upon the password change process
• Ensuring that our devices are protected with full disk encryption
• Improving and simplifying the security and access of shared devices
• Improving our ability to support the community

After the upgrade is complete, you may receive this prompt the first time you reboot your computer:

The computer will reboot automatically after 2 minutes, or you can choose to restart your computer immediately.  Upon the next login to your workstation, you may receive the following prompt that may have a 30 second timer.  

You can click “Apply” or let the 30 second timer expire.  There is no further action required once this step has been completed.

You do not need to reset your Bitlocker PIN number.  If you have a recently issued FDU desktop computer, you already have Sophos Central. If you have any questions or concerns, please contact the University Technical Assistance Center at (973)-443-8822 or visit it.fdu.edu and open a support request.

Recently, our IT team became aware of an ongoing scam that targets international students by using spoofed phone numbers that appear to show calls originating from the student’s government agencies, including immigration offices and consulates. The scammers then claim that there is evidence that the student has been involved with a crime and that the student must pay a fine or surrender their money for investigation.

Students should be aware of unsolicited phone calls from individuals claiming to be from government agencies, and independently verify the authenticity of communications. Authenticity should be verified through a known and trusted avenue, such as independently calling the organization or visiting the organization’s physical location (such as the nearest consulate.) Since scammers spoof phone numbers to make it appear they are calling from legitimate organizations, searching the phone number online or relying on caller ID are not sufficient means for verifying authenticity.

As a reminder, students, faculty, and staff should all be cautious of anyone requesting they provide personally identifiable information, financial information, or money. Scammers will use threats in an attempt to coerce their victims into quickly providing personal details. If you suspect a call is legitimate, the best step is to ask for the caller’s name, hang up, and call the agency using an authenticated phone number to verify the claims.

Unlike a legitimate government agency, scammers often demand payment by wire transfer, gift card, or virtual currency. These forms of payment are difficult to track and almost impossible to recover. A legitimate government agency will never initiate contact with a student and demand immediate payment.

If you believe you or anyone you know was a victim of this scam, report the incident to the FBI’s Internet Crimes Complaint Center (IC3) at www.ic3.gov, and the U.S. Federal Trade Commission (FTC) at www.ftc.gov.            

Starting September 13th, 2022, at 8AM, FDU OIRT will upgrade the Sophos software on FDU owned Microsoft Windows computers to Sophos Central for Bitlocker Management. This software will be installed on your PC seamlessly without any action required on your part.

Our goal is to provide our community with as safe and protected a computing environment as possible. This upgrade will enhance our community’s device security and user experience by:

• Simplifying and improving upon the password change process
• Ensuring that our devices are protected with full disk encryption
• Improving and simplifying the security and access of shared devices
• Improving our ability to support the community

You will not need to reset your Bitlocker PIN number. If you have a recently issued FDU desktop computer, you already have Sophos Central. If you have any questions or concerns, please contact the University Technical Assistance Center at 973-443-8822 or visit it.fdu.edu and open a support request.

Welcome back! With the start of the Fall semester upon us, I would like to keep our students apprised of some important information regarding our IT environment.

OneDrive for Students

As an active student of the University, you are entitled to use one terabyte of storage on OneDrive. For more information on accessing OneDrive for Students, please visit the link below. As with all IT Resources please adhere to our Acceptable Use Policy.

OneDrive replaces your previous student drive, the L: drive. Storage on the L: drive has been infrequently used in recent semesters. However, if you require any old data from this drive, OIRT would be happy to assist you. Please contact the University Technical Assistance Center at (973)-443-8822 to create a support ticket.

Legacy Email Authentication

On Sept 19th, certain legacy email authentication methods will be disabled from our environment. This action is being taken to comply with new standards enacted by Microsoft. If one of your email clients stops receiving new messages as of 9/19, you will need to update your email authentication. Please visit the link below for full instructions:

Welcome back! With the start of the Fall semester upon us, I would like to keep our faculty and staff apprised of some important information regarding our IT environment.

OneDrive

Please be aware that your personal FDU OneDrive storage should not be used as a network or department share. If your department requires that functionality, we ask that you set up a Departmental Shared Drive. To proceed with requesting a Departmental Share, please ask your department head to visit forms.fdu.edu and complete the form titled Department Shared Drive Request (Faculty and Staff Only)

Legacy Email Authentication

On Sept 19th, certain legacy email authentication methods will be disabled from our environment.  This action is being taken to comply with new standards enacted by Microsoft.  If one of your email clients stops receiving new messages as of 9/19, you will need to update your email authentication.  Please visit the link below for full instructions:

Office 365 Group and Team Expiration Policy

Please be aware that teams and groups within Microsoft Teams, Outlook, and Sharepoint expire after one full year of inactivity. If you currently have an inactive group or team, please keep an eye out for a notification from Microsoft. Microsoft sends notices 30 days, 15 days, and 1 day before your team or group is set to expire. To keep your inactive team or group for another year, simply click the renew button within the email.

H: Drive

OIRT is simplifying file shares on Windows machines. Instead of using multiple drive letter mappings, all your folders are consolidated under the H: drive. We ask that you please start using the H: drive for all files that need to be stored in the cloud. On October 12, all other drive letters will be removed.

Starting on Thursday, 8/25, we will begin using a new print management software for interacting with the on-campus Xerox multifunction printers. Although the process for scanning to email and releasing a print job will remain unchanged, you will notice that the icons have changed. Additionally, the process to make a copy has been slightly modified. To make a copy from the Xerox multifunction printers, first select “Access Device” and then select “Copy”. 

For more information and to familiarize yourself with the new icons, please visit our online tutorial using the link below:

Thank you for your attention to this matter. If you have any questions, please contact the University Technical Assistance Center at (973)-443-8822.

Once per month, Microsoft sends a security update which is a mix of helpful security fixes, application updates and improvements. As an enterprise Microsoft client, FDU has the ability to test these updates and push them to FDU issued laptop and desktop PCs after they have been deemed ready for our users. However, Microsoft recently launched the Windows 11 operating system as part of the monthly update. Since they are eager for users to adopt the new OS, Microsoft began sending the option to upgrade to Windows 11 directly to FDU Windows computers. 

If you receive the option to upgrade an FDU issued PC to Windows 11, as shown below, we ask that you choose to “Stay on Windows 10 for now”. In addition to some reports of data loss and application issues, there is the potential for conflicts with FDU specific services and features. The University is actively testing Windows 11 and as soon as we are ready to support the new OS, we will send a follow-up alert with further information as to how to upgrade via self-service.

Barring special releases which are out of our control, we work tirelessly to ensure that these patches are distributed without impacting the community. Thank you for your understanding.

On Thursday evening, August 18^th, between the hours of 11PM and 3AM Eastern, FDU will be performing an emergency patch on our Virtual Private Network (VPN) server. As a result, the FDU VPN will not be available for the duration of the upgrade.

If you have any issues with connecting to the VPN after the update is complete, please reboot your device. If you have any further questions, please contact UTAC at (973)-443-8822 or open a support case on IT.FDU.EDU.