July 17, 2015

Dear Members of our Campus Community,

You may have seen the news announced this morning that UCLA Health was a victim of a criminal cyber attack. Our campus will continue to work in coordination with the Office of the President to monitor the situation.

According to UCLA Health, it does not appear that individual personal or medical information was accessed, but UCLA Health is offering free identity protection services to anyone who was affected.

I have asked our Interim CIO Denise Stephens to review our security measures and to work with the campus to ensure the security of IT systems. Interim CIO Stephens reminds us of the importance of working together individually and collaboratively to make UCSB more secure against cyber attacks. She requests everyone to:

  • Update and patch systems in your departments. This includes PCs as well as servers.
  • Update and patch personally owned devices, as they pose a risk if you use them for University business.
  • Keep updated anti-malware running on all systems for which solutions are available.
  • Remove obsolete systems from the network. This includes Windows XP PCs and Windows 2003 servers. Updates and patches are not available for them.

If needed, please confer with your IT support to coordinate these important steps. Enterprise Technology Services (ETS) and campus departmental IT staff continue to take aggressive steps to keep our systems protections up to date with current security patches and antivirus tools.

I am grateful for the ongoing efforts of our IT staff and to everyone in our campus community for their cooperation and participation as we work to ensure the security of our campus community. Thank you.

Sincerely,

Henry T. Yang
Chancellor