MCC Daily Tribune

Log 4j Vulnerability and Blackboard: What you need to know

As referenced in Eileen Wirley’s Trib Article on 12/21/21, the Log 4j security vulnerability was discovered recently and SUNY and ITEC are working through these issues, including some disruptions to our Blackboard system. We apologize for any inconvenience that this is causing during the end of the semester.

As you know, this security vulnerability has interrupted the usage of SafeAssign and ExamSoft tools. These tools are currently disabled.

As explained by our SUNY System Admin,

“To protect SUNY data we have turned off any B2 that can be affected by the vulnerability. The SUNY SOC (Security Operations Center) has worked with SUNY System Administration Office of Information Technology (OIT) and ITEC have also added some protections to many tools that could be vulnerable. SUNY SOC had us add new rules on the F5 load balancer that will block files that contain tools or add-ons that contain the log4j vulnerability. These files will be blocked by the load balancer and not be able to be added to Blackboard”.

As a result of these setting adjustments, this has had an impact on some of the normal functionality of Blackboard, especially related to uploading of various file types. Here are some of the trouble areas that we have received reports from students and faculty.

File Submissions in Assignments and Test File Upload:

Students may have an issue submitting work through the Assignment tool or a Test Submission file. They may get red banner that displays “Failed to submit assignment. Try Again”. Similarly, when building Assignments, faculty are also seeing the same message when trying to attach a file of their own. This has also extended to adding files within a graded assignment submission.

Here is what is recommended:

To get these files added to Blackboard, we are recommending that users use the “print as PDF” feature and create their documents in a simple PDF.
If that is not an option, we recommend that the user add their file or files to a cloud storage solution and share the link in Blackboard.

This will allow the tools to be run off ITEC and SUNY Servers and protect our data. Once the vulnerabilities are fixed, we will be able to remove this rule off the load balancer and turn on all tools we have turned off.

Here are several other suggestions that have helped some users:

Docs created in Google seem to cause a problem when converted to PDF and submitted through Assignments. Try to convert a Google Doc to an RTF file.
If there is image data within the file, trying swapping out the image for a different file type. There seems to be a metadata issue with Google (for students copying and pasting images from Google)
Word doc files can be converted to PDF and submitted
We have tried swapping out a PNG for a JPG in a Word Doc and this decreased the file size

Transferring Course Materials:

As faculty are getting their courses ready for the upcoming semesters, we have had several reports of zip files not uploading properly to perform a normal export/import of a course. If you experience an issue with courses not importing from one semester to another, please reach out to the Virtual Campus team during our drop-in hours this week or after the holiday break:

Dec. 22nd, Wednesday: 10AM-12PM and 1-3PM (Zoom or FIC)
Dec. 23rd, Thursday: 10AM-12PM (Zoom or FIC) and 1-3PM (Zoom only)
Our Zoom link is located in the "Faculty Essentials" tab and the FIC is located in 3-122A

We will be closed during the holiday break from December 24-January 2nd and return on January 3rd. We will not have any open Zoom or FIC hours until Jan.3rd. Please plan accordingly.

While the college is closed, you may reach out to the SUNY Help Desk for Blackboard assistance regarding any of these issues mentioned:

Phone: 1-844-673-6786
Website: https://online.suny.edu/help/
Normal Hours: Mon-Fri 7AM-12AM midnight EST, Saturday 10AM-8PM, Sunday 10AM-9PM
Holiday Hours: Closed Dec. 25th, 26th and Jan 1st, Reduced hours on Dec 24th and Dec 31st (close at 4PM)
Knowledge Base for Common Issues: https://online.suny.edu/support/

We know that this is inconvenient, but we are trying our best to keep all our data safe while not affecting how our users use Blackboard.

Thank you for supporting students this year!

Andrea Gilbert
Instructional Technologies
12/22/2021