Dear Faculty and Staff,

Cyber threats are scary. From the phishing messages you ignore, to the complex financial scams we hear about on the news, these sophisticated attacks have become frequent in our daily lives.

We understand that you’re worried about your confidential information – your paystub, student grades and intellectual property – and today we’re ready to offer you a new tool to help keep that information safe.

Multi-factor Authentication (MFA) pairs your myTrent username and password with your smartphone, so you can “approve” logins on your phone before access to your account is granted. You have likely seen this technology before with other web applications such as social media or online banking. This simple measure has been proven to effectively thwart the ability of an attacker to break into your account.  Gaining access to your username and password will not be sufficient for an attacker to gain access to your account as they won’t be able to approve the login without your phone.

After many months of development, we’ve worked hard to develop an approach to MFA that makes sense for Trent University and the different workflows of our users. Here are a few particulars:

• Once you have enabled MFA on your account, you will only be required to complete the prompts when logging in from off-campus. Logins from on-campus will not require MFA to complete.
• The Microsoft Authenticator app at the center of our MFA deployment uses push notifications to simply complete the login process – there’s no need, in most cases, to enter a code. Clicking approve on your phone is all that is required.
• The technology we’ve adopted for MFA is provided as part of our Microsoft 365 subscription. It’s safe, effective and constantly updated to keep up with the latest security threats.

To opt-in to MFA, click the notification link in the myTrent portal, and follow the instructions to pair your phone with your myTrent account.

Need more information? – No problem, take a look at our support page at: https://www.trentu.ca/it/services/microsoft-azure-mfa-multi-factor-authentication for answers to frequently asked questions, step-by-step tutorials on how MFA works, and setup instructions.