Announcement – IT Connect

Adobe Creative Cloud Security Breach Affects 7 Million

We’d like to make you aware of a recent report of a security breach that occurred on one of Adobe’s Creative Cloud servers.

Security researchers recently found a publicly available server that was not password protected that contained some customer information. Adobe has responded to this report by securing the server in question and providing more information as to what was exposed. The information revealed was as follows:

Email addresses
Account creation date
Which Adobe products they use
Subscription status
Whether the user is an Adobe employee
Member IDs
Country
Time since last login
Payment status

Adobe has also made clear that no payment information or passwords were revealed. So, what does this mean for us at SMU since we are users of Adobe Creative Cloud? Thankfully, not much! This breach did not affect any SMU computers with Adobe software.

We must always remain vigilant in our modern world of security breaches. With the information that was exposed, there is always a possibility that the info could be used for phishing campaigns. Always be on the lookout and let the IT Help Desk know if you receive any suspicious messages!

Sitecore at SMU 2018–2019 Infographic

The Office of Information Technology (OIT) Web Team recently reviewed the usage of Sitecore on campus, support and training for Sitecore, and how the smu.edu is being accessed. While this review can help with analyzing the effectiveness of the tool and our support, it will also help prepare us as we move to upgrade sites to the next generation of page layouts.

Some interesting tidbits are highlighted in the infographic, such as almost 4.2 million users visited SMU online last year. Of those users, most use Chrome or Safari to access smu.edu. This could be due to almost half of the users are accessing the site on mobile devices and those are the default browsers for Android and iOS.

As for Sitecore editors, of which there are almost 700, the top 7% of active editors – users that have logged in and made an edit within the last year – performed over 50% of all actions within Sitecore. Also, almost 10% of the editors are students.

More of these results can be seen in the following infographic.

Continue reading Sitecore at SMU 2018–2019 Infographic

Introduction to Newswriting Student Earns 1,000th MOS Certification

CCPA students — Introduction to Newswriting students taking their MOS certification practice test.

Last spring, Sandra Duhé, Chair of Corporate Communication and Public Affairs (CCPA) reached out to OIT to learn how they could incorporate the Microsoft Office Specialist (MOS) certifications in the classroom. As a result, two CCPA courses are requiring their students to get MOS certified this semester.

During last week’s testing, CCPA student and Senior, Matthew Brink, received the University’s 1,000th Microsoft Office Specialist Certification since the program’s inception. Continue reading Introduction to Newswriting Student Earns 1,000th MOS Certification

Build Your Data Science Skills with LinkedIn Learning

The realm of Data Science is one of the fastest-growing professions today. From academic research labs to the corporate boardroom, data scientists are in high-demand to help take enormous amounts of data and process and visualize it to help make big decisions. Data Science is also a constantly changing industry, with many different programming and scripting languages to serve all kinds of disciplines.