IT Accounts and Passwords

The university has in the past often been blacklisted by Hotmail and other email providers.  This happens when people reply to “phishing” emails purporting to come from UEA’s IT helpdesk asking people to send through their username and password. UEA’s IT Helpdesk will never email anyone asking for details of your password.

What is phishing?

Phishing (pronounced fish’ing) is the act of sending an e-mail to a user falsely claiming to be from a legitimate source (such as the UEA IT Helpdesk) in an attempt to acquire sensitive information such as usernames, passwords and credit card details.

What happens when you reply to a hoax “Phishing” email?

1. If you reply to such an email with your username and password, the spammers will log in to your UEA account. They will then be able to see all of your private emails and files.

2. The spammers will use your UEA email account to send thousands of spam emails to other people.

3. This will result in other email providers (e.g. Hotmail) "blacklisting" UEA. This means that nobody at UEA can send any emails to anyone with a hotmail address for several days afterwards. This causes a great deal of inconvenience for the 30,000 (approx) members of staff and students at UEA who will all be affected by this problem.