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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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