Category: Announcements

Announcements/Updates to the BMC community

Upcoming Security Enhancements to College Systems

We will be implementing several security related enhancements in our ongoing efforts to strengthen our cybersecurity program, protect our valuable data, and reduce cyber risks in our environment. These changes should be invisible to the community, but will help to improve our ability to detect and respond to compromised accounts and other phishing emails.
The objective of these security enhancements will be to help accomplish the following:
These and other efforts help us to remain vigilant regarding cybersecurity threats. Your cooperation is very important for maintaining the integrity of our systems and protecting sensitive information. We continue to emphasize the importance of completing information security training as this training is an integral part of cyber defense.
Thank you for your attention and commitment to helping to protect our environment from cyber threats.
For any questions or security concerns, please do not hesitate to reach out to help@brynmawr.edu or 610-526-7440.

RESOLVED: Panopto Unvailable TODAY, 10/10/2025

Update: The issue is resolved as of 4:25pm

Starting this afternoon at 2:55pm, community members both on and off-campus are unable to access the College’s instance of Panopto: https://brynmawr.hosted.panopto.com. LITS has reported this outage to Panopto and they are investigating.

Please contact the Help Desk with any questions: help@brynmawr.edu or 610-526-7440.

Be Aware: New Phishing Attacks are Making the Rounds

In the past couple of weeks, a number of phishing scams have made the rounds in the Bryn Mawr community. Though the exact contents of the messages vary, they all follow some usual patterns:

    • Be wary of messages that threaten the loss of your account if you don’t take specific (and swift!) action.
    • Be cautious when opening files or file shares that you aren’t expecting or are from a name you don’t recognize.
    • Job offers that appear too good to be true usually are – and these rarely come in unsolicited email!
    • Emails that are listing lots of expensive or rare items are scams.

Even if these messages appear to be coming from a Bryn Mawr email or use Bryn Mawr branding, they are a scam. LITS will never ask you to fill out a form to verify your account. Do not respond to the email, click on any links, or fill out any forms. Do NOT share your passwords or DUO codes with ANYONE. LITS will never ask you to verify a DUO prompt or send you a passcode or password.

Often, phishers will use scare tactics – like threatening to terminate your accounts – to get you to follow their instructions. If you ever get an email and have questions about what it’s asking you to do, please reach out to the Help Desk (help@brynmawr.edu or 610-526-7440). Please feel free to delete any phishing messages you have received.

If you believe you’ve given your password or personal information to a phisher, please change your password immediately and get in touch with the Help Desk.

Email scams come in many forms. While we work to keep you informed, attacks are increasingly diverse and sophisticated. It’s not possible for us to warn you of every message before you see it. Be cautious and suspicious. If you ever have a question or suspicion, don’t hesitate to contact the Help Desk.

Please contact the Help Desk if you have any questions: help@brynmawr.edu or 610-526-7440.

 

RESOLVED: Issues Accessing Tripod while On Campus

Update, 8:40am: All access issues appear to be resolved and community members are once again able to access Tripod from both on and off campus. Please report any lingering issues or unexpected behavior to the Circulation or Help Desks.

Starting this evening, community members have been unable to access Tripod, the library catalog.  Currently, these issues seem to only affect people who are on-campus. We are actively looking into the issue, but it appears that it might be related to an outside network issue that is affecting more than the College. Currently, we don’t have an estimate for when it might be resolved, but we hope that things will be back up and running as quickly as possible.

While it’s unavailable, patrons will be unable to do things like search for books or articles, access their patron records, or place holds. If you have any questions, or need to place an urgent hold, please email the Circulation Desk at circulation@brynmawr.edu.

Moodle Fall 20-Spring 22 Course Archiving on October 16

LITS has archived fall 2020-spring 2022 academic courses and will begin removing them from Moodle on October 16.

About course archiving

  • Per our Moodle policy, LITS must remove old courses from Moodle periodically to make way for new course content and to ensure optimal application performance.
  • To ensure instructors can continue to reuse those course materials in future courses, we create back-ups that preserve the course layout, resources and activities and move them to archival storage before removing them from Moodle.
  • Instructors cannot access archived courses directly, but can ask LITS to copy them into a new course shell at any time.
  • Academic courses from fall 2017-summer 2020 have already been archived in this way and LITS has been restoring them into new course shells upon request since fall 2020. See for details.

What action is required?

If you wish to export content from fall 2020-spring 22 courses, please do so before October 16.

  • You only need to export course materials and questions if you plan to use them outside of Moodle (including in other learning management systems).
  • For privacy and security reasons, archival back-ups do not contain student data or content. You must export this content to retain it beyond October 16.
  • See Moodle: Export Course Data and Content for how-to info.

Otherwise, you need to do nothing.

If you have any questions or would like help exporting content from Moodle, please schedule a consultation with an educational technologist or email help@brynmawr.edu to connect with our Moodle support team.

RESOLVED: Some Campus Services Unavailable

Update: This issue has been resolved and community members are again able to log in to all campus services. Please report any lingering issues or oddities to the Help Desk.

This morning, community members have started to report being unable to login to some Bryn Mawr services, including EZBorrow, eMarket, Interfolio, Domain of One’s Own, and Parchment. LITS is working to diagnose and resolve these issues as quickly as possible. We apologize for any inconvenience this may cause.

Please contact the Help Desk with any questions or concerns: help@brynmawr.edu, 610-526-7440