No Phishing on Campus!
A recent article in The Chronicle of Higher Education states that at least 86 Campuses have been hit in an email Phishing scam over the past few weeks.
“Phishing” emails appear to come from a trusted source — in this case the College/University campus IT Department — and send you to a web site to gather (verify) some personal information. This web site may look like it is legitimate but it is not. [ Wikipedia on Phishing ]
In the reported scam — campus network usernames and passwords were gathered from students staff and faculty. It is reported that in 42 of these campuses the gathered information was later used to break into the campus network.
Phishing scams are more commonly found targeting banking and online shopping sites like eBay. I am not sure what information the originators of this scam were looking for — possibly financial records.
At this point Tyndale has not seemed to be targeted in this “Phishing trip”
David Schuchardt Said,
April 15, 2008 @ 10:55 am
So the rule is never give out personal (passwords, user names, etc)? Are there ways to tell that something is Phishing site? What do we do in the event that we get sent something? When do I push the panic button???!!!
Andy Said,
April 16, 2008 @ 8:42 am
@David – Typically this is a good rule! In this case the email was coming from the campus IT department. Here at Tyndale this information would never be asked here – in fact – in most cases IT departments would never need to ask for that info – they would be the holders of it.
The other thing is to carefully watch the URL – does it look right? If you know the normal url you would use to login to – use that one.