Happy New (Academic) Year!
The start of a new academic year brings many new people to campus for the first time - students, faculty, and staff. The campus directory (http://directory.njit.edu) is the most convenient place for students to find basic contact information for faculty and staff. Please take a few moments to review your entry and update information that may be missing or incorrect. Updating requires that you authenticate with your University Computing ID (UCID) and password. If you need assistance, please contact the IST Help Desk at (973) 596-2900.
All NJIT students are issued an official "@njit.edu" e-mail address. By policy, the university issues many official communications to students via their officially assigned e-mail address. Within Highlander Pipeline, faculty have tools to e-mail individual or groups of students in their assigned classes. Questions on these tools can also be referred to the IST Help Desk.
While on the subject of e-mail, I would again like to caution faculty and staff about the increasing volume of "cyber scams" and other hoaxes that are being sent via e-mail.
There continue to be a large number of very realistic appearing "phishing" attempts where faculty and staff are asked to provide usernames, passwords, dates of birth or other personal information to renew e-mail accounts. The attempts are very realistic because they appear to come from any number of generic sources, such as:
Please realize the phishers are simply taking the "NJIT" from our domain name of NJIT.EDU and adding it to generic names such as "Help Desk." The same tactics are attempted with thousands of colleges, universities, and other organizations across the Internet.
Another tactic phishers use increasingly is to embed a hyperlink within an e-mail message and ask you to click on it. When you click through it may appear to be a legitimate NJIT site that asks you for your username and password. However, on close examination, you can see that it is a third-party site often operating overseas.
Phishers need only to deceive one member of the NJIT community to obtain an e-mail account from which they can launch a global spam attack. This has happened already with several NJIT e-mail accounts. It results in commercial spam prevention services flagging NJIT.EDU as a spam site, which in turn has a cascading effect of blocking legitimate NJIT e-mail at sites across the Internet. The end result is a major inconvenience for all members of the NJIT community.
You may have seen similar phishing attempts to collect your personal credit card information with e-mail appearing to be from e-Bay, Pay-Pal, or large financial institutions. You should always be wary of electronic solicitations where you are asked to provide personally identifiable information. Providing such information may result in identity theft which can be expensive to resolve, detrimental to your credit rating, and extremely inconvenient.
If you receive e-mail you suspect is a phishing attempt, do not reply to it or click any links within the e-mail. Please forward any suspected phishing e-mails to abuse@njit.edu. This central reporting system will allow IST staff to better track impacts on the NJIT community.
Note again that NJIT will never ask you to provide private information (SSN, date of birth, user IDs/passwords) in an e-mail. Log-on credentials will only be asked at the legitimate point of entry to a system (e.g. NJIT portal, e-mail, etc.) when you have actively initiated entry to the system. Questions may be referred to the IST Help Desk.
Best wishes to all for a productive fall semester
Thank you.