New IT security measures contributed to surge of calls, emails
By Jake Wray, News Editor
The CEIT help desk was briefly overloaded with calls and emails early this month which prompted Douglas College to post a bulletin on its website on September 7 warning of help desk delays.
The bulletin said the surge of calls and emails coincided with the start of the new semester, but the surge was bigger than usual this semester, according to Jason Dadswell, manager of client services for CEIT.
“This year, things were a little bit more than we have had in the past and the reason for that is we’ve implemented some security measures,” Dadswell said in a phone interview with the Other Press.
Dadswell said one of the primary new security measures is that the passwords for some students’ online Douglas College accounts now expire more quickly. If the passwords remained unchanged for too long, Dadswell said, students must call the help desk to establish a new password.
“We got a whole lot of password resets all at once,” he said, adding that other factors may also have contributed to the surge. “We’re trying to figure out all of the different factors that went into this.”
Students can reset their password without calling the help desk, Dadswell said, but only if they have opted in to the self-service password reset tool. Instructions as to how to opt in can be found at douglascollege.ca/password.
The IT department is taking steps to make sure the help desk doesn’t get overloaded again, according to Dadswell.
“We took some steps in the moment to try to soothe things and then we’re going to be taking steps on a longer term basis,” he said. “[For example] people may have experienced the [voicemail] box being full … So we’ve increased the cap on it.”
The bulletin on the college website has now been removed and help desk service has returned to normal, according to Dadswell.
“Things have settled down. We’ve caught up,” he said.
