November 2023 Newsletter

What are we doing?: Under CMR 23005, IOT is going to be migrating the Protected Zone ASA firewall to new Cisco Firepower hardware running as ASA.

Why are we doing it?: The current hardware has reached its end-of-life and is no longer supported for hardware and software updates by the manufacturer.

When are we doing it?: The migration will occur on Saturday, December 2 at 3:00 PM.

How will you be impacted?: We will be migrating using the current firewall operating system, version and configuration, so the impact should be minimal. Servers that are using the firewall as their gateway may need to have the ARP cache refreshed by either manual intervention or system reboot.

What should you do?: Be prepared to access and test your systems before business hours on Monday, December 4.

How will we communicate questions and progress?: A Microsoft Team has been created entitled “IOT Dec 2023 PZ Firewall Migration”. Click the link to join the Team. We will communicate general information in the general channel. We will create channels for specific questions or issues as necessary.

The Indiana Office of Technology is reminding state employees to be aware of scam emails this holiday season, such as fake holiday promotions, package delivery and phishing emails wanting to gain personal information or your state credentials.

Scammers become more creative and bolder during this season, knowing that many people do online shopping and are willing to give out their account information or click on a phishing link.

One of the first steps to prevent these scam emails is knowing what types of scams to look out for. Well-prepared employees that are armed with the knowledge they need can have a positive impact on the State of Indiana’s overall cybersecurity.

The goal of phishing messages is for scammers to fraudulently gain your information and use it for their personal gain, such as a ransomware attack. While online banking and e-commerce is safe, as a general rule, you should be careful about giving out your personal financial information online. When in doubt, do not put your username and password in a site.

These messages have the following characteristics:

• They are unsolicited.
• They contain an urgent request for personal financial information.
• To entice a response, they frequently contain exciting or upsetting statements.
• They will purport to be from a legitimate business (banks, PayPal, e-Bay, etc.)
• They are generally not personalized, though they can be.
• You may be directed to fill out a form in the email, go to a linked website, or call a telephone number.

The sender will eventually seek some or all of the following:

• Name
• Address
• Date of birth
• Bank account
• Social security number
• Login ID and password

Phishing attempts also can harvest employee credentials or malicious payloads that could infect your computer or the state’s network. While not all spam messages are scams or malicious, it is important for all employees to be vigilant when receiving emails from an unknown source.

How to be proactive:

• Do not click on emails/texts from unknown senders.
• Verify the legitimacy of websites before providing personal and financial information.
• Stay away from websites or ads that offer items at unrealistic discounted prices—if a deal from an unknown seller seems too good to be true, it more than likely is.
• Beware of purchases or services that require payment with gift cards.
• Thoroughly check credit card statements.
• Never make purchases using public Wi-Fi.
• Always get a tracking number for items purchased online.

IOT has employed several tools to protect state user mailboxes from receiving these kinds of messages. Emails detected to have phishing or malicious payloads are blocked and prevented from being delivered into the user mailbox. Messages determined to be general spam will be quarantined to be reviewed by the user here in our spam portal: https://security.microsoft.com/quarantine.