Urgent: SMS multi-factor authentication is being removed for safety reasons

Dear university users (students, faculty and staff),

This is an important security change from the George Fox University IT department. Our commitment to protecting your account and information is our top priority.

What is happening and why?

To align with industry security standards and defend against modern cyberattacks, we are removing SMS (text messages) and phone calls as multi-factor authentication (MFA) methods for all university systems in the near future.

  • SMS is no longer safe: Industry security standards now consider SMS-based codes to be the weakest form of MFA. They are vulnerable to attacks like SIM swapping, phishing, and interception.
  • The change: Once this change is in effect, you will no longer be able to use a text message code to log in to university systems such as Gmail, Canvas, and MyGeorgeFox. If you haven’t set up a new authentication method by then you will no longer be able to access your George Fox account.

This entry was posted on Tuesday, September 30th, 2025 at 4:04 pm and is filed under Newberg employee news, Newberg Graduate student news, Newberg Undergraduate student news, Portland employee news, Portland student news. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. Both comments and pings are currently closed.

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