I understand this email is only one of many you will receive this week, so I want to welcome everyone to the 2026 fall semester and try to cram as much information as I can into as little web page space as possible. If you want to skim, that’s fine – here is what I am going to cover. There will be a section for each of these topics with an appropriate title, so skim away!
- For everyone – welcome and be looking for your fall cybersecurity awareness training invitation
- For everyone – AI is both your friend and your worst enemy – Sylas is here!
- For those using Berry issued computers – there is a change in how software updates will be completed
- For those who use Berry P-cards (IYKYK) – there will be a change in how credit card numbers in unencrypted emails are handled by the email system
Whew! That’s a lot! Let’s get going!
Welcome!
Welcome to the fall 2026 semester. I hope that everyone is rested from the summer (those of you who got it off, anyway) and ready for a semester of vigorous academics and rousing athletics! Fall is the season for football, volleyball, soccer, cross-country, golf, tennis, basketball, swimming, and more. Granted, if you don’t want to see these events in person, and you want to stream them you will have to get a subscription to Flo-Sports. This is new this year. That’s all I’ve got to say about that…
Be looking for an email in September inviting you to complete your cybersecurity awareness training. We do this twice a year – once in the fall and once in the spring. This year, the training course will open just prior to Cybersecurity Awareness Month in October. Anyone failing to complete training two semesters in a row will be sanctioned with some strict login rules that will require you to use multifactor authentication on a more frequent basis. More details in the September newsletter.
AI can be your best friend AND your worst enemy
I’m sure many of you have used AI in some way or another to complete work or to research a topic or just to see what kinds of crazy output you can get from it. You may have used AI and not realized it. It is embedded in many applications now, including Adobe Acrobat, Microsoft Office, and many websites. AI can be very helpful in crunching large amounts of data. For example, say you want to host a party to celebrate the start of the semester. You only have a few food items available to you, so you ask AI to create a menu for your party using those items. It will happily sift through recipes and check what it knows about party foods and suggest a menu for you. You might get some interesting ideas for party menu items. Or you might get gibberish that is inedible. Both outcomes are possible.
Here at Berry we are trying to use AI to help you. Sylas, our one-stop AI agent, will be able to answer lots of your questions. To find out more about Sylas, you can stop by Memorial Library on Sunday afternoon from 2PM-4PM or take a look at the many posters around campus, including at the D-hall, and on the digital signage around campus. We designed Sylas to be your friend…
But AI can also be monumentally frightening. If you missed one of the more troubling events surrounding AI this summer, take a look at this blog post from OpenAI. An AI model escaped a sandbox and hacked another company. This was not the only incident this summer. This article from Dark Reading talks about an issue that Meta had with one of their models along with touching on other incidents. SkyNet could happen…
It’s not just rogue AI we need to worry about. AI is allowing cyber-criminals to craft better phishing emails – ones that don’t have misspelled words or poor grammar that is easily spotted. Pay attention to the banner on your emails that lets you know an email came from outside of our email system. It looks like this:
That doesn’t mean the email is malicious, just that it came from outside the Berry system. If you receive an email you feel mistakenly has the banner attached to it, let us know and we will look into it.
Future Software Updates Will Include a Forced Reboot
The Office of Information Technology (OIT) attempts to update all managed computers on a regular basis. The problem with updates is that they almost always require a reboot of the device being updated. This is inconvenient for most users (I especially hate it) so many do not reboot their machines (I do reboot my machine, grudgingly). Starting this semester, when updates are sent to managed computers, there will be a required reboot. In the past this reboot was mostly optional and could be delayed by the user. This will not be the case moving forward. Any machine that is not rebooted in a specified time after updates are installed will be rebooted remotely.
We are also moving to install updates in a shorter time frame after they are released by the manufacturers. Our goal is to shrink this time to no more than three days from the time of update release to when we install the updates on managed computers. With most companies following Microsoft’s lead in releasing patches on the second Tuesday of the month, this means that we will be attempting to send them to computers before the weekend, most likely on the Friday after patch Tuesday. While this violates a popular tenet in technology known as “don’t make any changes on a Friday”, we feel this is the best way to approach the issue, as Thursday is too soon and Monday is probably too late. Why speed up this process? Because AI, which we just talked about, is allowing cyber-criminals to produce malware faster and faster and we must be able to patch and update our computers before the attackers can produce malware to use against them.
Don’t Send Credit Card Numbers in Unencrypted Emails!!!
Many of you are accustomed to filling out what used to be paper forms with your credit card information and sending it to a vendor, a hotel, or other service to be able to pay them. This was relatively safe when they were paper forms. These days, those forms are usually scanned and emailed, which potentially exposes your credit card information. Let me be real clear about this – You should never send your credit card information in an unencrypted email. I put that in bold so it would stand out and even the skimmers would see it. Many of you do this to reserve rooms at a hotel for athletic teams or other groups that are traveling overnight away from the college. Others do this to place orders for large numbers of jerseys or uniforms, certain types of equipment, or other purchases.
I’m begging you – find another way to do this. Ask the vendor, hotel, or service provider if they have a secure website to handle these transactions. If not, ask them to accommodate a secure email exchange with you. If you don’t know how to send a secure email, check out this article on the Berry OIT support site. At some point, at a time we honestly have not determined, our systems will begin to block the sending of credit card information in unencrypted emails. Please take the time to work with your vendors and providers as soon as possible to be able to securely submit payment information to them.
That’s it for this newsletter – it will be September before you know it (next week) and there will be a new email in your Inbox and a new newsletter to read. If you have questions about any of these topics, please don’t hesitate to email me…my contact information is in the email that got you here.
All Berry students, faculty and staff have MFA enabled on their Berry account, and you should use it in the most secure way via the Microsoft Authenticator app on your smart phone. But don’t stop there! Use the Microsoft Authenticator as your second factor on any site that supports Google Authenticator. Turn on MFA/2FA everywhere you can. Yes, it will take you another few seconds to log in, but your data and account will be safer.
Please continue to report those phishing emails! Avoid using “unsubscribe” links and report both spam and phishing via the “Report” button.
If I’m not covering a topic of cybersecurity you are interested in or concerned about, please let me know. I want to be your first and best resource on cybersecurity information, so tell me how I can help and inform you.
Check out https://support.berry.edu for more information about OIT and the services we provide. You can always check back here for warnings about current phishing emails, confirmations of valid emails you might have a question about, and data breach notifications.
Food For Thought
This is a longer video than I usually post here, but it does take a somewhat humorous look at a very serious aspect of AI that has recently been discovered – AIs protecting other AIs
Featured Image: Photo by Brant Sanderlin for Berry College
December News from Information Security
