What is phishing?
Phishing (pronounced fish’ing) is the act of sending an email to a user falsely claiming to be from a legitimate source (such as UEA IT Helpdesk) in an attempt to acquire sensitive information such as usernames, passwords and credit card details.As a matter of good practice
NEVER SEND YOUR PASSWORD IN AN EMAIL |
ANY EMAIL WHICH ASKS FOR YOUR PASSWORD IS A HOAX |
What happens when you reply to a hoax Phishing email?
1. The spammers will log in to your UEA account. They can 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.
4. Action to stop the spammers may require the mail service be interrupted for short periods. This causes annoyance for any users logged in to webmail at the time who will get an error message asking them to re-enter their login details and may lose messages they are in the middle of composing.
5. Your UEA IT account will be disabled and you will be unable to login until you have contacted the helpdesk to resolve the problem and change your password.
What is Information Services doing to reduce phishing?
Information Services is carrying out a number of technical initiatives to reduce the impact of phishing email. We cannot give all the details here as this would merely give spammers an opportunity to develop workarounds.In short, though:
1. Information Services has an automated script running that checks outgoing mail for a valid 'reply to' address and automatically blocks users who meet certain criteria from logging into the mail server. This is then reviewed manually.
2. We have upgraded to CanIT anti-spam software which enhances our defences against phishing email, including rate-limiting (reducing number of emails sent within a given time frame and number of recipients) and black-listing of known phishing addresses.
