Termination of Matlab Licenses on Solaris Platform (Moscow Node)

As most departments had migrated their Matlab licenses to the Windows platform, extremely low usage of Matlab was recorded on the Solaris platform (Moscow Node), and the CSC therefore will terminate Matlab licenses on Moscow when they expire on 30 June 2009. In this connection, departments are reminded to purchase or renew their PC Matlab licenses for teaching and student use in the CSC Teaching Studios for the coming academic year and inform the CSC accordingly.

For enquiry, please contact the CSC Help Desk.

Security alert: Excel Vulnerability - Zero Day Attack

Microsoft's Excel spreadsheet program has a 0-day vulnerability that attackers are exploiting on the Internet. The vulnerability is caused due to an error that may cause an invalid object to be referenced when opening an Excel document. When this object is successfully referenced, it may install a trojan onto the vulnerable machine. A fix has not been provided from Microsoft.

Further details are available here:

http://secunia.com/
advisories/33954/

http://vil.nai.com/vil/content/ v_149690.htm

According to NAI, McAfee VirusScan Enterprise with DAT 5534 (released on 23 February 2009) or above should be able to detect this malicious Excel document. To find out the version of the DAT, right-click on the "shield" icon of VirusScan on the system tray, and click on "About VirusScan Enterprise...".

The DAT version of today (27 February 2009) is 5537 which should have been automatically pushed to all PCs on staff LAN. If for some reason your DAT version is still below 5537 (which means the automatic push has failed), please try to manually update the DAT file immediately by right-clicking on the "shield" icon, and click "Update now...". If that still does not work, please contact the CSC Help Desk.

Microsoft recommends, when opening files from unknown or un-trusted sources, users should use the Microsoft Office Isolated Conversion Environment.

Further details are available here:

http://www.microsoft.com/ technet/security/advisory/
968272.mspx

Deployment of Windows XP Service Pack 3

(This message is not applicable to those users whose PCs are already running Windows Vista.)

Windows XP Service Pack 3 (SP3) is a combination of all previously released performance, security, and stability updates for Windows XP. In addition, it offers some new and enhanced functionalities in networking, security and setup. Therefore, Windows XP SP3 provides a new baseline for Windows XP users.

Windows XP SP3 has been pushed to all campus PCs that are still running the pre-SP3 versions of Windows XP of the CityUMD domain (i.e. all Staff LAN and Student LAN PCs) on 17 February 2009. It was downloaded automatically and silently. To reduce the impact on machine performance, the installation time was set at 1pm and no user intervention was required. On average, it took about an hour to complete the installation in reasonably equipped PCs.