Around 8:30 AM, ITS staff began receiving email notifications indicating that there was unusually high activity on electronic portfolio that was stressing our databases. One of the databases was restarted at around 8:40 AM to handle this issue, everything returned back to normal shortly after that time.

Then, at 11:00 AM, many in ITS noticed their inability to access the internet. When the networking staff began looking for possible signs of problems, none of the usual devices showed any signs of problems. Over the next few minutes, various ITS staff members collaborated in trying to locate this elusive issue, and concluded that one portion of the network was unable to access the Domain Name Servers (these are the servers that translate a name such as google.com or www.wesleyan.edu to an IP address). Our attempts to contact Cisco, a network provider, were not successful. Since then we have had many conversations with them and they are analyzing the data collected during this period.  At that point, we began restarting various network devices to isolate the issue. Finally, the restart of one of the devices called the Core Switch, cleared up the problem at about 1 PM.

Unfortunately, due to the interdependencies between systems and network devices, the e-mail system serving both students and faculty malfunctioned when one of the network devices was restarted; this issue was resolved approximately around 3 PM.

We also received wireless access issues around 5:00 PM and the problems were resolved shortly thereafter.

We are continuing to investigate these problems with the help of Cisco and are consulting with colleagues in other institutions to see if they have experienced something like this. We will update this blog when more information becomes available. This investigation may require us to test certain things which may result in brief network interruptions, but we will plan to do these during off hours and weekends.

We understand that these service interruptions are very disruptive to all of us; we in ITS work hard to ensure that these disruptions do not happen.   We do apologize for the inconvenience that this caused for all of our users.

Diagnosing the problem was extremely difficult because our network devices where so overwhelmed with incoming network traffic that our network staff were unable to get access to them. They restarted the devices, only to see them immediately become overwhelmed and unresponsive again. This pointed to a Denial of Service (DOS) attack on our network.

At approximately 2:30 PM, we logged another problem call with CEN, who acknowledged that there may be a network issue specific to our network. Soon thereafter, their engineers determined that one of our servers was being targeted for Denial of Service attack by external hosts. We immediately disconnected that host from the network, though this really does not help stop this type of attack. The attackers were still sending the network traffic targeted at this host, and our internet connection continued to be saturated with network packets that died ONLY after they came into our network.

The prescription for deflecting the attack calls for certain steps (which, for security reasons, we do not wish to elaborate on here) that were followed collaboratively by our staff and CEN staff.

Due to the complex nature of internet traffic routing, it took until 4:45 PM or so to completely deflect the attack.

During this time, several internal services were available and certain others were interrupted a few times. Internet connectivity both from and to Wesleyan was practically nonexistent during this period. Woodframe houses, whose connections to the internet go through Comcast, were not affected aside from being unable to access Wesleyan services during the outage.

We apologize for the inconvenience caused by this outage. We plan to investigate this incident further, work to understand the cause of the problem, and correct it to prevent future attacks like this.

These messages have been the source of confusion and concern for the people who have received them. The users who receive these nondelivery messages did not send the original Spam messages that are being rejected, making it seem as though the users’ accounts have been hijacked for the purposes of sending Spam. In fact, the users’ accounts have not been compromised.

Because of the nature of the e-mail systems, there are no restrictions on what e-mail address is designated as the “from” address in external e-mail. This means that if a Spammer elects to forge a Wesleyan e-mail address as the “from” address for Spam messages, there is nothing preventing the Spammer from doing so. Over the past two weeks , it appears that more Spammers are doing this. Because many Spam filtering servers around the Internet are configured to send a nondelivery report to the from address of offending messages (even if the “from” address is forged), many of these nondelivery reports are ending up in our users’ mailboxes. This phenomenon is called backscatter Spam. The act of forging the “from” address for such purposes is also referred to as a JoeJob.

While there are some measures that we can take to reduce backscatter Spam, we cannot eliminate it entirely. This is because in certain cases our users would want to receive nondelivery reports that are legitimate (unfortunately there is no way to distinguish whether the non-delivery report is due to a forged “from” address). We are working to refine our procedures for filtering backscatter Spam.

If you need further information, please contact your Desktop Support Specialist or the Helpdesk.

Agreement to Respect Intellectual Property Law

All members of the Wesleyan community are bound by local, state, and federal laws in their use of intellectual property of all kinds. This requires a working knowledge of the principles of copyright law, and the ability to make informed judgments about whether or not any particular use of copyrighted materials is justified under the rubric of fair use, or if it requires asking permission of the copyright holder. These judgments are required both for academic materials (scholarly books and journals, data from databases, software) and for non-academic materials (music and video used for entertainment purposes, for example.)

By clicking on the accept button below, I acknowledge that as a member of the Wesleyan community, I am committed to understanding and respecting intellectual property rights. In particular, I agree to not use Wesleyan network resources to illegally access or share audio and video materials that I do not have the right to access or share.

More information about Intellectual Property can be found at the Wesleyan Intellectual Property Website at http://www.wesleyan.edu/ip/ .

Starting from August, the administrative assistant in your department who has departmental FRS (our financial records system) access will receive an email between the 5th and 10th of every month, if there is  at least one international call by anyone in the department during the previous month. The E-mail will contain a link to the International Call Details application under the Tools & Links in your employee electronic portfolio. This application will also allow the administrative assistants to access historical monthly bills from May 2007 onwards. This application will also provide details on who to contact in case you have questions about the calls or if you would like us to change the access because of personnel changes.

After several months of intense preparation, we are ready to upgrade PeopleSoft, our institutional administrative systems software. This is a major upgrade and the process of upgrading and testing to make sure everything worked correctly is expected to take four days. We will begin the process on Thursday, July 12 at 12:00 PM and expect the new system to be in full use by 10:00 AM on Monday, July 16.Many of the systems that our users use, such as electronic portfolio and Blackboard, are dependent on PeopleSoft, so during this upgrade process, several systems will be affected. We have taken extraordinary steps to ensure that many of these systems continue to be available during the upgrade with the exception of a few hours of downtime. We have listed the expected downtimes for the critical services below. However, because of the complexity of this upgrade, there may be unanticipated service downtimes during the weekend. We will inform everyone right here about all such announcements. In addition, information will be posted on the electronic portfolio login page as well as ITS home page.

Expected Service Downtimes:

Thursday, July 12 12:00 PM – 2:30 PM – Electronic Portfolio, WesMaps, Blackboard
Monday, July 16 6:00 AM – 8:00 AM – Electronic Portfolio, WesMaps, Blackboard

Please note that the electronic portfolio that will be in use from Thursday, July 12 – Monday, July 16 will not contain all the links.

Click here for information about specific portfolio applications.

• During the first week of August, the Wesleyan Computer Store in Exley Center will close.
• We expect the Cardinal Technology Center in Usdan Center to open during the week of August 13th. This is where you will go if you want to purchase computers, iPods, printer cartridges, wireless routers, cables, etc.
• The Cardinal Technology Center will have substantially longer hours of operation than the current computer store. It will be open from 8 AM – 9 PM on weekdays and from 10 AM – 6 PM on weekends during the first semester.
• The Cardinal Service Center, which will handle all the repair and warranty work, will continue to stay in the Exley Center in its current location. It will be open from 8:30 AM – 5:00 PM, Monday-Friday.
• The space vacated by the current computer store will be restructured and the ITS Helpdesk will move into this location.

• Our main service window and individual student mailboxes will be located on the main lobby. This service window will offer sale of stamps and shipping support.
• All mail processing, including receiving, sorting, metering, and shipping, as well as student parcel processing, storage, and distribution, will take place in the lower level. This is the window that will support package pickup.
• With the anticipated greater traffic, Wesleyan Station service window hours will be extended. The main service window will be open from 9:00 AM to 4:00 PM.
• The package pickup window on the lower level will be open from 9:00 AM to 4:30 PM.
• We will also be implementing new delivery practices. There will be one daily delivery to departments on campus. The delivery route will begin later in the morning to ensure that all incoming mail can be sorted and delivered the same day.
• This change will allow us to staff the extended service window hours and give Wes Station staff more time to deal with the sorting and processing of mail on the two levels.
• Designated department personnel can arrange to pickup any department mail at the pickup service window that was not delivered during the daily delivery run by the post office.