We wanted to offer an update to the IT Critical Incident we experienced on Friday 22nd February.

The storage supplier has offered a temporary fix as a workaround to the root cause of the problem.

The fix was applied last night (Monday 25th Feb), although not a full patch to repair the problem it should prevent a reoccurrence of the issue while we wait for the main update.

The storage is now running at full resilience and is no longer at risk.

As an update to the earlier message, all previously listed services are now available.

The incident appears to be an issue with our storage. We are still investigating the root cause and as such the storage is operating at reduced resilience.

Please accept our apologies for the inconvenience this incident has caused.

Services currently affected are:

• Collab file shares
• N Drives
• Reading.ac.uk website
• Mailman
• e-mail delivery

We are aware of the inconvenience this may be causing you and are treating this with the upmost urgency.

As soon as we ascertain more details, will post further information on the extent of the incident, services affected and estimated resolution time.

Please accept our apologies for the disruption this has caused.

We are receiving reports of a new phishing email that is arriving in University email inboxes. The email appears to be from a student but is in fact sent maliciously by a 3rd party.

The emails we have been able to view look like the one below:

(Click the image to view full size)

These are similar to the emails we received last year that appear to have the same look and structure.

Do not open this email as it could damage your work and computer and may make your private details vulnerable.

If you are concerned about this email or other similar emails then please call ex.6262 or go to reading.ac.uk/it

If you are a member of staff whose students are reporting this to you we strongly recommend that they change their password via the https://password.reading.ac.uk website.

If you go to https://password.reading.ac.uk/reset/ you can reset your password; provided that you know your University Username, Student Number and PIN. These can be obtained by filling out the form at https://password.reading.ac.uk/reminder.

For tips on keeping yourself and your information safe online, visit the IT web page on Cyber Security.

We have hit the max number of VPN IP addresses already and while we think we can increase capacity slightly, there is no obvious workaround that doesn’t require re-architecting the system. We will continue to work on this today and the future.

In the meantime we advise staff to consider the below guidelines:

• If you don’t need to use the VPN to access N Drive/Collaborative Fileshare etc then please don’t. Use OneDrive and Team sites wherever possible.
• If you need to access files then you should copy them to your OneDrive and then log off the VPN. This will free up connections for those who really need it.
• You don’t need a VPN connection to access your email. You can do this via Outlook on a laptop or via the O365 portal.
• Log out of the VPN as soon as it is not needed.