Posts Tagged: Sree Mada

Sept. 18 deadline for multi-factor authentication enrollment

All UC ANR employees must be enrolled in UC ANR's DUO Multi-factor Authentication by Friday, Sept. 18, 2020. This is an additional enrollment specifically for UC ANR, which is separate from UC Davis DUO enrollment that happened few years back.

Increased cybersecurity threats make multi-factor authentication (MFA) essential for securing access to critical UC ANR systems.

Starting Monday, Sept. 21, 2020, MFA DUO will be required, and UC ANR personnel who have failed to enroll will not be able to access any single sign-on application through UC ANR. These applications include the UC ANR Portal and UCPath.

UC ANR personnel should already have received an invitation email from MFA DUO. For more information about enrolling in DUO, visit http://it.ucanr.edu/MFA-DUO/DUO_at_UC_ANR/. If you did not receive an enrollment invitation email from DUO, please contact help@ucanr.edu.

For those who already enrolled and requested physical tokens: Please note ANR IT will start shipping physical tokens this week to be ready for Sept. 21. Please submit a ticket to help@ucanr.edu with your home address if you are planning to use a token instead of your cellphone.

Thank you, 

Sree Mada, Chief Information Officer

The Multi-factor Authentication Project Team

Cyber attacks slow UC ANR servers

UC ANR Colleagues,

Our server-security monitoring tool Malwarebytes has detected and mitigated eight malware variants, one ransomware attempt, and 379 potentially unwanted program accesses. It also appears to have blocked thousands (2,648) of malicious web traffic destined to webservers. This malicious traffic accounts for increased CPU processing by Malwarebytes, which is our “firewall” designed to mitigate the swarm of attacks that reach each server.

Due to the significantly heightened level of processing required, we are currently experiencing intermittent disruptions within Information Technology applications over the last few days, which could affect one or more of the following services:

• Site Builder websites & UC ANR blogs
• Portal access to tools including login, Zoom and Zendesk
• Survey and registration system, as well as credit card processing for event registrations
• Communication systems such as Collaborative Tools and Mailing Lists
• Administrative systems such as the Grant Tracking System, Universal Review System, ANR Directory, and DANRIS-X

Our teams are aware of the issue and are actively working to resolve it as soon as possible. We apologize for any inconveniences is caused by this situation and assure you that we are using all resources available to restore service as quickly as we can.

If you have any questions in the interim, feel free to email the HelpDesk at help@ucanr.edu.

Thank you for your continued patience and understanding.

Regards,

Sree Mada
Chief Information Officer

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