Following a recent Barnard data leak (caused by a student clicking the link in a phishing email claiming to be a professor offering free money) Barnard College Information Technology has announced that it is switching its security system to the newly-released Trio Mobile.
Trio Mobile takes all the things you know and love about Duo Mobile — the frantic hunting for your phone and praying it’s charged when you innocently decide to log in to your email, the causing of a growing line at the clubs fair because the alert won’t send — and adds in the new industry-standard safety measure of a scroll delivered by carrier pigeon.
“We’re really confident that this small extra step will increase campus cyber safety while not causing too much of an inconvenience to students,” Christine Whalley, head of BCIT, said in a statement last Friday. “It’s really quite simple – send an alert to your phone from your computer, click the green checkmark, and await the arrival of your pigeon. Then, 3-5 business days later, your pigeon’s scroll can be retrieved from the brand new Barnard Aviary, which will be replacing the mailroom. Sign the paper, initial the bottom of every page, fill out the form with your social security number, street you grew up on, and your mother’s maiden name, crumple it up, and throw it on the floor. At this point you should be able to access your email with no problem.”
In protest of the new app, some Barnard students have been pushing back by refusing to log into their emails at all. University leadership is unsure how to ask boycotters to stop, since the pleading email they sent had no effect, for some reason.
