U of C to create 9,000 new email accounts for staff

By Scott Strasser, May 31 2016 —

Due to a malware attack over the weekend, the University of Calgary’s IT department will create 9,000 new Office 365 email accounts for staff members.

“This option is the fastest solution to allow immediate access to send and receive new emails,” reads a systems issues update  from the IT department. “It is now clear that it will take several weeks to resolve Exchange email issues.”

According to the update, the new accounts will be for Cyrus and Exchange users. Those already using Office 365 are unaffected.

IT will create the new emails in three “waves” this week. Old data from Exchange email accounts will be migrated to the new accounts in the ensuing weeks.

“It’s critical to implement a solution that will allow people to access email now and resume normal business operations as soon as possible,” reads the update.

The malware attack disabled access to University of Calgary computer services over the weekend. The services affected included the AirUC-Secure wi-fi network and Office 365 webmail. The attack also restricted access to U of C computers.

As of May 31, all services have been restored by IT staff except for Exchange email and Skype for Business.

“Thanks to the hard work of IT teams, major progress has been made towards resolving current systems issues caused by malware, which is software intended to damage or disable computers and computer systems,” a May 30 statement from the university said.

The outage coincided with the Congress for the Humanities and Social Sciences, Canada’s largest annual gathering of scholars, which the U of C is hosting from May 28 to June 3. The university claims no Congress events were or will be affected.

Services such as Desire2Learn and myUofC were not affected by the attack.