The holiday season brings joy, celebration, and—unfortunately—an annual spike in online scams. With shopping, travel, and donation requests at their peak, cybercriminals ramp up their efforts to trick busy students, faculty, and staff with too-good-to-be-true deals, fake charity solicitations, and realistic phishing emails. Continue reading #SecureTheSeason: Don’t Let Scammers Steal Your Holiday Spirit
In October, SMU launched a simulated phishing campaign that targeted faculty, staff, and students. The simulations weren’t designed to “catch” anyone but were intended to reinforce security habits and to create an experience that could be learned from. Let’s dive into the message and see what exactly made this a “phish.” Continue reading You Have a New Voicemail… Or Do You? What Our Phishing Campaign Revealed
In July 2025, a major security vulnerability—identified as CVE-2025-53770—was uncovered in on-premises versions of Microsoft SharePoint Server. This isn’t just another small bug fix. The flaw is so serious that attackers are actively exploiting it around the world, gaining unauthorized access to organizational data and systems, even bypassing identity protections like Multi-Factor Authentication and Single Sign-On.
Continue reading Microsoft SharePoint Vulnerability: We’re OK!
Researchers from Cybernews released a statement this week, reporting that over 16 billion passwords have been exposed in a massive data breach. The leaked data could potentially impact accounts from major platforms such as Facebook, Google, Apple, and more. Cybernews claims this data appears to be new, supported by evidence provided in their post. However, other sources suggest that the passwords may be compiled from previous breaches.
The stolen data seems to come from Continue reading What you should know about the 16 billion passwords data breach
Last week, OIT enabled Safe Links to emails inbound to campus. This security features has been in use for some time in Microsoft Teams. We’ve now extended the service to protect SMU email accounts, adding an additional layer of security to inspect embedded URLs in emails for possible phishing/malware sites in real-time. Continue reading Safe Links Add Enhanced Security to Your Email
