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Thursday, July 26, 2018
The Michigan Daily — michigandaily.com
NEWS
Phishing scam goes after
U-M Weblogin credentials
Fake payroll emails
link to fraudulent
Weblogin page
By ALICE TRACEY
Summer Daily News Editor
A string of fraudulent payroll
emails,
distributed
among
University of Michigan community
members on July 13, scammed
some recipients into revealing
their U-M online credentials. The
messages directed recipients to a
fake Weblogin page in an attempt
to steal their passwords, a type of
cyberattack known as phishing.
U-M
Safe
Computing
immediately released a notice
warning
the
University
community about the scam and
outlining a plan for defusing the
situation. In order to shut down the
attack, information administrators
blocked the IP address on U-M
networks
and
took
steps
to
digitally flag the site. They also
worked to remove unopened scam
emails from recipients’ mailboxes
and helped affected employees
change their passwords.
In an email interview with
The Daily, University Privacy
Officer Sol Bermann, the interim
U-M chief information security
officer, said the University’s quick
response
helped
contain
the
damage caused by the phishing
attempt.
“The
U-M
Information
Assurance team quickly identified
this phishing attack, and took a
number of steps to quickly mitigate
its effectiveness,” Bermann wrote.
“Our team continues to improve on
how we detect and rapidly respond
to these sorts of threats, as a result,
very very few U-M community
members were affected by this
attack.”
Bermann
suggested
U-M
faculty, employees and students
learn more about phishing scams
on the Safe Computing website,
and also recommended turning
on two-factor authentication at
Weblogin.
Team of researchers
beats IBM’s record
By ELIZABETH LAWRENCE
Daily Staff Reporter
A team of engineers at the
University of Michigan has
created
a
computer
small
enough to stand on the tip of a
grain of rice. With a volume of
0.4 cubic millimeters, it holds
the title of the world’s smallest
computer, outdoing IBM’s most
recent attempt.
Because of its small size,
there are limitations on what
the device can actually do.
But according to Xiao Wu, an
Engineering doctorate student
who worked on the project, the
defining elements of a computer
are all present.
“It has basic components
of a computer,” Wu said. “It
has a microprocessor that’s (a)
general purpose processor unit.
It’s an Arm patent Cortex-M0+,
so it’s a commercial processor.
And it’s also got its own
memory. So it’s a smaller and
simpler version of a computer,
but it’s got basic elements of the
computer.”
The computer is the product
of many years of work, according
to David Blaauw, a professor
of electrical engineering and
computer science who co-led
the recent project and has been
working on tiny computing
since 2005. Throughout the
years, his team has found ways
to reduce power consumption
of computer chips and circuits,
enabling the development of
smaller computers.
Blaauw said with such low
power consumption comes the
challenge of figuring out how to
make a computer run.
“We consume, in standby
mode when the sensor’s sort
of dormant, a few nanoamps,
whereas a cell phone would
consume
a
few
milliamps,”
Blaauw said. “So it’s about a
million times less than a cell
phone
power
consumption
in the same kind of dormant
mode.”
Blaauw
said
another
challenge is that the computer
can only be handled wirelessly.
His team communicates with
the
computer
though
light
signals, and also uses light
to recharge it. Regular-size
computers and cell phones are
able to charge through wires,
but the new computer is too
small for any kind of connector.
“We can’t just conveniently
charge it, it has to charge itself
with light or something like
that,” Blaauw said. “It can’t
sort of reprogram itself easily
with the wire. You need to do
it wirelessly. Everything needs
to be done wirelessly; it’s very
challenging.”
‘U’ builds world’s
smallest computer
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