Welcome to Great Falls College MSU
Services Status
Use the link below to see the current status of Great Falls College services. IT is updating the Services Status page on an ongoing basis. If you have a question about a service that is not listed there, send an email to webrequest@gfcmsu.edu.
Great Falls College Services Status Page
Latest Communication
Campus network update: College-owned devices, restored servers, Banner, VPN between campuses, and change to campus computer login process.
Sent at 10:37 a.m. Friday, May 15, via email, Brightspace announcement, and mobile app notification to students, faculty and staff.
Good morning,
IT now has nearly 400 devices scanned, deployed and returned to campus.
The team is continuing to rebuild some of our key servers, and Phil Carr is working with a contractor to introduce those servers back to the system in a safe and secure manner.
He also soon will be working with Montana State in Bozeman on the process to restore the VPN connections between the two campuses.
IT continues to make great progress, but with many of the most critical functions already restored, the advances are not as dramatic as they were in the early days.
One small change over the weekend to better follow Microsoft’s best practices is that in order to log onto a campus computer, you will have to press CONTROL+ALT+DELETE.
We thank you so much for your continued patience.
Frequently Asked Questions
Updated: May 2, 2023
General Questions
All students, faculty and staff should reset their network password.
If you have files on your local hard drive that you have been unable to access since the April 20 incident and you have no prior backups, then there is no solution available to restore access to those files. (These files may have an unfamiliar file extension.)
(A backup would be an alternate storage location like an external hard drive, USB thumb drive or some other location not on your local hard drive.)
If youu have files in your OneDrive or in SharePoint that you cannot access, you can restore these files to a prior version. See OneDrive File Recovery for instructions.
IT is in the process of returning devices that were not compromised by the cyber incident on April 20 to their owners. College-owned devices that have been returned by IT are safe to use again. Devices that were compromised will have their hard drives replaced before they are returned. That will take some time.
B-wing computer labs have Internet access for the college-owned devices in them. Personal devices will not have Internet access. Faculty members should work with Toni Quinn in order to reserve a room for classes or testing. B124 is reserved for faculty and staff to check email. Detailed instructions on logging into the system are written on the white board in front of the room.
The Testing Center is also up online again. Any students who have been using the center this semester can again use it for computer-based testing.
You should turn in your college-owned computers, hard drives and USB thumb drives to be scanned.
There is no known risk to phones or personal devices.
Caution should be taken to ensure any personal devices used on our network were not infected. Although the risk of infection is low, it will be important to use your personal tech support avenues if you feel that your personal device may have been infected. Additionally, please ensure that you have up-to-date antivirus software running along with an up-to-date operating system and software.
For Windows devices you can use this scanning tool: https://learn.microsoft.com/en-us/microsoft-365/security/intelligence/safety-scanner-download?view=o365-worldwide
