Monday, April 14, 2014

Today's topics:

Heartbleed OpenSSL vulnerability.

Cornell's IT Security Office has issued alerts about the recently discovered "Heartbleed" vulnerability in recent versions of the commonly used encryption protocol, OpenSSL (http://www.it.cornell.edu/services/alert.cfm?id=3141 and http://www.it.cornell.edu/services/alert.cfm?id=3139).

As of 11:00 AM on April 8, all of the public-facing services at CLASSE were updated to address this vulnerability. We constantly monitor our internet traffic and are actively performing security audits and scans of our network and systems. At this time, we do not believe it necessary for CLASSE personnel to change their CLASSE passwords. If we receive new information or recommendations that require action from CLASSE personnel, we will issue a revised statement.

New SSL certificates

As a precautionary measure in response to the Hearbleed SSL vulnerability, the CLASSE IT group generated new keys and SSL certificates for all of our affected publicly available services. This should have been transparent for most users and systems. However, depending on the configuration of your system and software, you might be notified that the certificate on the system you are connecting to has changed.

CLASSE all-hands meeting presentations

Presentations from the most recent CLASSE all-hands meeting (26March2014) have been posted at: https://wiki.classe.cornell.edu/CLASSE/Private/StaffNotes

CLASSE IT Newman and Physical Sciences Building Office Hours

Michael Roman maintains these office hours:

• Newman 120 - Wednesdays 2:00 - 3:00 PM
• PSB 314 - Mondays 2:00 - 3:00 PM
• and as needed

see https://wiki.classe.cornell.edu/Main/MichaelRoman for up-to-date schedule, plus some other info

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General network and server maintenance will occur every Tuesday from 12:00 noon to 2:00 PM. The CLASSE-IT group will always announce any expected disruptions in our NewsLetter and via CLASSE-IT-NEWS-L, but with the size and complexity of our network there is always the potential for something to go wrong. We will do our best to contain all network maintenance and planned outages to Tuesdays from 12:00 noon to 2:00 PM.

Unless other arrangements have been made, CLASSE-managed Windows systems may be updated and rebooted on Tuesday morning at 2:00 AM, so please avoid critical or lengthy operations at that time. For more details, please see SystemExpectations.

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Questions or problems? Submit a service request.

Other resources:

• CLASSE-IT Home Page
• Previous newsletters

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