Over the last few weeks, phishing attempts have increased significantly against SMU e-mail addresses. This is a trend that is being seen at universities around the world, and OIT has been working on solutions to try and prevent accounts from being compromised. Starting this week, there will now be one more way that phishing attempts may be thwarted. Continue reading New Safeguards Against Phishing On The Way
Tag: spam
Important notice about the recent increase in phishing attempts
Over the past several weeks, there has been a significant increase in phishing attempts targeting SMU email addresses. In many of these cases, the messages masquerade as important documents requiring your attention either via Concur, DocuSign, or Adobe. Before you click on the link or open the attachment, here are some recommendations to help determine if the email is legitimate or a phishing attempt: Continue reading Important notice about the recent increase in phishing attempts
Got Spam? Report it to Us!
In 2016, SMU received over 504 million e-mails. Out of all of those e-mails, only 2.8% of them were legitimate messages that actually made it to inboxes. The rest were all junk, including messages with viruses, marketing materials, and other messages from addresses with bad reputations. Continue reading Got Spam? Report it to Us!
Web links rewritten by new anti-spam feature
On Tuesday, July 2, SMU implemented a new feature as part of our anti-spam defense to rewrites web links considered questionable, included in inbound emails. The purpose of the rewrite is to prevent phishing and malware scams by forwarding certain web requests to a proxy service for analysis. While some benign links might be overwritten, the service protects against “zero-hour” exploits where the threat could be unknown. If a link is still considered suspect at the time it is clicked, the you will receive a prompt to either decline or proceed to the website in question.
The URL rewrite policy was recently adjusted on Thursday, July 7, and our team will continue to monitor the service to ensure that the policy is neither too lenient, nor too aggressive when rewriting the web links. Please contact the IT Help Desk at help@smu.edu if you have any questions regarding this change.
New Email Phishing Simulations Coming Soon
Phishing attempts are email messages sent by hackers pretending to be your friends, coworkers, or trusted companies. These emails try to lure you to reveal your personal information, such as your passwords, credit card numbers, or bank account numbers, with alarmist sounding messages. Some may even direct you to an official-looking website requesting such information. These websites may also be infected with computer viruses or other forms of malicious software. Phishing messages have potential to damage our IT infrastructure and expose sensitive University data.
Due to the increased volume of recent phishing attempts, SMU’s Information Security Team is launching another round of the phishing awareness program, AntiPhish. This program will send simulated phishing emails, analyze how SMU employees respond to these messages, and track the success of employees in recognizing and deleting phishing emails. For those falling victim to the phishing attempts, the Information Security Team will offer training tools to help employees learn how to avoid falling victim to phishing messages. The phishing simulations will take place at SMU in the coming weeks.
As a reminder, if you receive any email message that appears malicious or asks for confidential personal information, Information Security asks that you do the following:
- Contact the IT Help Desk or your local IT Support group regarding the email.
- Delete the email from your mailbox without clicking on any hyperlinks or attachments.
For valuable resources and other information, please visit the Information Security website at www.smu.edu/OIT/Infosec.
If you have questions about the upcoming phishing simulation or training tools, please contact the IT Help Desk at 214-768-4357 (HELP).
