UT System IT is coordinating a risk assessment and remediation plan for a fancypants ransomware that hit worldwide on Friday and which has been accidentally/temporarily halted from further impact. For your home Windows machines, please refer to Microsoft’s customer guidance page. The short of it is – update your machines. The medium of it – the patch for this security flaw was issued back in March. Since we manage all public-facing Windows machines with Deep Freeze, we apply security and other updates on a weekly basis. All of those machines were already updated with the patch. A random sampling confirmed these March updates, but we’ll doubleback on Monday morning.
However, our staff machines are not managed by Deep Freeze, and thus, we need to confirm that those machines are up-to-date come Monday morning. Here is a spreadsheet of library personnel. When you come in Monday morning, please check Windows updates on your machine (desktop as well as laptop). If you are out-of-date, go ahead and run the updates – it may take a few occasions of checking, installing & restarting before you’re finished. Once you’re done, or if you were already up-to-date, note the date on the hyperlinked spreadsheet. Campus IT will be checking in with us, so it’s important that you do this as soon as you can. If we do not hear from you, or if you are out on Monday, we will reach out to you regarding the updates.
Note: all service desk machines at Check Out, Information Commons, and Studio have already been manually checked. Updates were run when necessary as of Saturday afternoon.
If more information or updates end up being required, we’ll let you know as we do.
Thanks and let us know if you have any questions or require assistance.