Acceptable use of IT facilities
Many of you will be aware that a severe security issue in the Linux kernel was recently announced. This has been dubbed as “Copy Fail” and a proof-of-concept Python script has been provided so that people may easily check if their systems are affected.
We would like to reassure everyone, mitigations were put in place for all Informatics managed systems on Wednesday evening as soon as this became public.
We would like to take this opportunity to remind everyone that you MUST NOT attempt to run any potential exploit code on University systems or in anyway attempt to acquire elevated privileges to which you are not entitled. This is potentially a very serious breach of the University Computing Acceptable Use Policy.
We are very closely monitoring this situation, we will be aware if any accounts attempt to abuse this exploit. If we deem the risk is significant enough, we will block all access an account immediately without warning. We will also pass the information over to our colleagues in IS so that UoE accounts may also be disabled.
We’re aware that we have many staff and students who study or do research on IT security. For anyone wanting to satisfy their own intellectual curiousity, please investigate exploits on your own isolated personal devices.
