Latest news on email systems and security reminders

 

Following upgrades carried out over the Christmas break, all staff and student @rvc.ac.uk email accounts now reside on the Microsoft 365 platform which has freed up 70TB of RVC server storage and provides other benefits such as offering all members of the College the ability to legitimately download versions of Microsoft Office on their personally owned devices – see

here for details.  

Following the project delivery review and other feedback received since completion of the email migration, some general settings have now been amended:

Office Clutter – Clutter analyses and filters out the types of messages that you usually ignore or don't respond to, based on your past behaviour. This additional cloud based email filtering service will now be disabled by default (as some legitimate messages may be filtered out); those users who still receive excessive amounts of unwanted emails may re-enable this utility by following the instructions available here on the College website.

Email forwarding – College emails should be directly accessed via an Outlook client or the web services provided (please note the webmail address is now http://mail.rvc.ac.uk) rather than relying on any auto-forwarding of messages to third party services such as gmail or hotmail. Auto forwarding of College emails has therefore been disabled under the 365 service to comply with College IT data protection policy and help reduce the spamming threat from spoofed email addresses etc.

Stories of ransomware are currently in the news with a million pound demand issued to Lincolnshire County Council to decrypt files locked by malware. LISD has recently counteracted such threats by adding another line of defence in the form of the Malwarebytes program now distributed to all network PCs, but as new variants of malware and exploits are produced on a daily basis users are advised that any important College data should be stored on the network drives provided rather than local C: drives or memory sticks/external hard disk drives etc. The Malwarebytes anti-malware and anti-exploit system has already successfully identified and blocked 12,408 threats in its first 3 months of operation.

For advice on the correct storage of research data in particular, please contact our Research Data and IT Procurement Manager, Gwyn Jervis (gjervis@rvc.ac.uk).

Despite improvements to email filtering systems, there will always be a few ‘phishing’ emails that make it through the net, some more convincing than others, so users are again reminded not to respond to messages since LISD Helpdesk and Infrastructure Services teams will never send emails asking for confirmation of your College username and password.

 

Library & Information Services Division