Phishing scams intensify
Sarah Rutledge
Issue date: 8/22/08 Section: News
While students and faculty may have been taking a break for the summer holidays, it appears internet scammers have been hard at work. Since February, there have been 14 rounds of phishing attacks, which led to a massive Rice e-mail blacklisting from several major e-mail providers this summer. An estimated 12 students, faculty and staff this summer volunteered their personal e-mail information to the fraudulent requests.
Phishing, which can happen not only through e-mail but also via telephone, is the act of attempting to get a person's personal information. By obtaining a person's password and user identification to a university e-mail account via phishing attacks, scammers can access that account and can use it to send fraudulent messages to other e-mail services. Because many e-mail providers have relatively strict spam filters, scammers look for university webmail e-mail addresses, which are seen as legitimate, Information Technology Security Officer Marc Scarborough said. This way, scammers can send more e-mails through these accounts and increase their chances of getting money from their message recipients.
Scarborough said a common scam, called the Nigerian 419 scam, involves a message informing the recipient that he or she is the heir to a large fortune. To receive the money, however, the recipient must provide the executor of the will with money to supposedly begin transferring funds to the heir. Scammers might receive money from gullible recipients who have virtually no way to track down the scammers, as e-mail addresses are almost untraceable, Scarborough said. And though these scams may see just five responses per 1,000 e-mails sent, those are still worth the scammers' time, he said.
In May, Rice e-mail was temporarily blacklisted from e-mail providers at www.yahoo.com and AT&T due to the spam coming from several hijacked accounts. Scarborough said this four-day blocking of e-mails hurt Rice business.
But Rice is not the only university to fall victim to phishing, Scarborough said. Students, faculty and staff in universities across the world are receiving these requests for personal information. Scammers will modify their e-mails to mimic messages the university's IT departments might send to its students.
Phishing, which can happen not only through e-mail but also via telephone, is the act of attempting to get a person's personal information. By obtaining a person's password and user identification to a university e-mail account via phishing attacks, scammers can access that account and can use it to send fraudulent messages to other e-mail services. Because many e-mail providers have relatively strict spam filters, scammers look for university webmail e-mail addresses, which are seen as legitimate, Information Technology Security Officer Marc Scarborough said. This way, scammers can send more e-mails through these accounts and increase their chances of getting money from their message recipients.
Scarborough said a common scam, called the Nigerian 419 scam, involves a message informing the recipient that he or she is the heir to a large fortune. To receive the money, however, the recipient must provide the executor of the will with money to supposedly begin transferring funds to the heir. Scammers might receive money from gullible recipients who have virtually no way to track down the scammers, as e-mail addresses are almost untraceable, Scarborough said. And though these scams may see just five responses per 1,000 e-mails sent, those are still worth the scammers' time, he said.
In May, Rice e-mail was temporarily blacklisted from e-mail providers at www.yahoo.com and AT&T due to the spam coming from several hijacked accounts. Scarborough said this four-day blocking of e-mails hurt Rice business.
But Rice is not the only university to fall victim to phishing, Scarborough said. Students, faculty and staff in universities across the world are receiving these requests for personal information. Scammers will modify their e-mails to mimic messages the university's IT departments might send to its students.
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John Midas
posted 3/02/09 @ 4:02 PM CST
Unfortunately there's a lot of scams out there. For college students, some other scams to watch out for are "free" ringtones that trick you into signing up for an overpriced subscription service, weight loss products that don't work (wu yi green tea, acai berry, etc. (Continued…)
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