This post will be our last blog post.  Since starting this blog in 2015, we've published each week of the school year on various IT topics.  We'd like to thank the readers, as well as those who helped to create the blog content, for sticking with the blog these last 3 years.  It has been a pleasure serving you with this blog over the years, and we hope you have enjoyed reading it.

Instead of this blog, we will be shifting our attention to our public wiki pages at https://wikis.utexas.edu

Computer researchers have recently revealed that the main chip inside most modern computers and other electronic devices --- the CPU --- has a hardware design flaw, or bug. This flaw creates two serious security issues dubbed “Meltdown” and “Spectre”.

The design flaw in CPUs has been there since 1995 and affects most CPUs, regardless of manufacturer.  While the scope of the problem is not yet well understood, it is believed to affect nearly every modern computer and device with a CPU.

At this time, we know it affects the hardware that runs Microsoft

Recently, several machines in the College of Natural Sciences have been found to be infected with a variant of Elite Keylogger. 

Keyloggers can be hardware or software, and are designed to capture all keystrokes a user makes on a machine.

This variant of Elite Keylogger is illicit software that sends logs of captured keystrokes to machines on the Internet, where these logs are parsed.

The people responsible for deploying the keylogger are usually looking for keystrokes that are username/password combinations that will gain them

Vulnerable versions of Adobe Flash are being actively exploited. Please patch your copy of Flash as soon as possible.

Title: Adobe Flash Releases Out-of-Band Flash Player Security Update
Description: Adobe has released an out-of-band security update for Flash Player in response to CVE-2017-11292, a zero-day vulnerability under active exploitation. CVE-2017-11292 manifests as a type confusion vulnerability. Reports have indicated that this vulnerability is being leveraged by the Black Oasis APT group. Users are advised to update as soon as possible to reduce the

Earlier today an announcement was made of a serious security vulnerability in a protocol that encrypts almost all WiFi traffic today. An attack against this vulnerability exposes all encrypted wireless traffic for an attacker to read, record, or possibly manipulate. The vulnerability exists on all unpatched platforms and wireless access points, although testing by the people who discovered this vulnerability shows that Android phones and Linux and BSD computers are the easiest for hackers to exploit.

To exploit this vulnerability, a hacker needs only to be within

Our thoughts are with the many Texans enduring or recovering from floods and wind damage along the coast, around Houston, and in South and Central Texas. Many of us have family and friends in the affected areas.  It's natural to want to help, but please remember to be careful about requests for help via email or social media.

Scammers are already using Hurricane Harvey to trick people into clicking on links on Facebook, Twitter, and in phishing emails trying to redirect the money into their own pockets that we would give to help the flood victims. 

Tuesday saw a second major malware attack in as many months, affecting several countries, dozens of major companies, and thousands of machines.  And nobody believes it will get better any time soon.

If this malware attack sounds like last month's WannaCry ransomware attack, that's because it is.  Just like WannaCry, cyber ambush uses the same backdoor exploit developed by the U.S. National Security Agency, an exploit known as EternalBlue, which malware programmers have modified so that it not only spreads and infects computers, it also encrypts the data on vulnerable

We recently blogged about Red Hat Enterprise Linux 5 (and its variants), as well as Windows Vista, turning 10 years old and going End-of-Life.

Today we turn to Ubuntu 12.04 LTS, AKA Precise Pangolin, the first of the "Long Term Support" (LTS) versions of Ubuntu linux.  Ubuntu 12.04 LTS turns 5 years old this month, which is the length of LTS support from the vendor, Canonical.  As such, it will no

Microsoft Windows Vista turned 10 years old and reached its end-of-life (EOL) on April 11, 2017.  As such, Microsoft no longer offers security updates, technical support, software, and content updates for Vista.  Machines running Vista no longer meet UT minimum security requirements, leaving these systems vulnerable to attacks. In addition, new hardware, software, and third party software updates may no longer work with Windows Vista. In short, keeping Windows Vista installed on your systems is a disaster waiting to happen.

If you are running Windows Vista today, it is

It is hard to believe that Red Hat Enterprise Linux (RHEL) 5 and the various distributions based on it (CentOS, Scientific Linux, and others) turned 10 years old last month!

With their 10th birthday on March 31st they've reached end-of-life, which means that maintenance will cease, and there will be no further updates to any software installed via vendor packages.

That means we can no longer make any security guarantees, and any future security or other vulnerabilities detected in packaged software or the core operating system will not be patched.  At that time, because

Colleagues,

This morning the OpenSSL development team published a security advisory [1] regarding two high-impact TLS/SSL vulnerabilities.

The first vulnerability, CVE-2016-0800 and nicknamed "DROWN" (Decrypting RSA with Obsolete and Weakened eNcryption), allows for a cross-protocol attack whereby an attacker could decrypt TLS sessions between clients and hosts that support SSLv2 and "export" cipher suites [2]. CVE-2016-0800 also allows for the decryption of traffic between clients and even non-vulnerable servers, if another server supporting SSLv2 and export

Microsoft has ended support for older versions of its popular web browser Internet Explorer (IE) as of Tuesday, January 12, 2016. After that date, Microsoft will no longer be releasing security updates, patches, or bug fixes for all versions of Internet Explorer except Internet Explorer 11 and later. After January 12, if you are still running an unsupported version of IE on the campus network, you are putting the University at risk.

In an effort to keep the campus computing environment safe and secure for everyone, all Windows computers should be upgraded to IE 11 as soon as

If you are running Windows 8 (not 8.1), you need to upgrade ASAP!  The January 12, 2016 Patch Tuesday contained the last updates for Windows 8.  If you are still running Windows 8, it's time to update to Windows 8.1 or Windows 10, or risk exposing your PC to unpatched security risks.

Thanks to a quirk in Microsoft's support lifecycle, Windows 8 is no longer supported.  This is because Windows 8.1 is considered a service pack to Windows 8, and Microsoft provides two years to upgrade to a service pack before discontinuing support for the previous release.  Since

On November 2, 2015, the Information Security Office (ISO) asked the IT community to configure systems so that their portmappers (also known as rpcbind) weren't exposed to the public Internet, or required authentication to access. Here is the ISO's description of the portmapper, its concerns with portmapper; and its plan of action dealing with systems with portmappers exposed to the public Internet:

"Portmapper is an RPC service, which always listens on tcp and udp 111, and is used to map other RPC services (such as nfs, nlockmgr, quotad, mountd, etc.) to their corresponding

Colleagues,

Over the weekend a cross-site scripting (XSS) vulnerability in WordPress was publicly disclosed that affects all versions of WordPress prior to 4.2.1. This vulnerability could enable an attacker to execute arbitrary code on the plugin and theme editors of a WordPress site--which could enable full compromise of the site itself--if a specially crafted XSS payload were placed in the comments section and then viewed by an authenticated administrative user.

Yesterday, the WordPress security team released what they've classified as a "critical" security

The purpose of these pages is to demystify IT and IT policy for faculty, students and staff in the College of Natural Sciences here at the University of Texas at Austin.  We have created this venue to educate and inform you about policies and best practices on the management and use of computers, networks, peripherals, software, services and more.  We aim to provide a clear path through the sometimes confusing array of policy statements, product announcements, and security warnings that abound in our technology-laden world.

We will start with a series of articles