Reminder for students: Protect your New Paltz accounts with Duo

August 17, 2020 Andrew Bruso

This message was shared with students on Aug. 17, 2020.

Dear students,

If you are one of the almost 4,000 students who have already started using the Duo service, you can ignore this message.

In case you haven’t seen our previous emails, the College is now requiring use of the Duo system to protect logins.

Duo is a Multi-Factor Authentication (MFA, sometimes called two-step authentication or two-factor authentication) service. In addition to a username & password, it provides additional protections for your New Paltz account. It will verify your identity via a smartphone app (or a USB security key if you either don’t have a smartphone or have one that runs an old version of Android or iOS).

For more specifics about Duo and how it works, and why New Paltz is requiring it, please see www.newpaltz.edu/duo.

When you’re ready to start using Duo, just go to www.newpaltz.edu/duo-signup (once you do this, you’ll be added to the Duo system within the hour).

We are gradually increasing the list of systems that need Duo (so we can get people to sign up gradually). Duo is currently required to access the following services:

The College’s payment center via my.newpaltz.edu;
Office 365
The College’s VPN (Virtual Private Networking) service.

We will be requiring students to use Duo to access Blackboard at some point in the fall semester (likely in October), so we are strongly encouraging students to sign up and get familiar with the system before then.

If you haven’t signed up already for Duo, please do so soon! If you do so have any problems, please reach out to our Service Desk (servicedesk@newpaltz.edu or 845-257-HELP).