cyber security: [may 2008]
Published: 04/04/08
- E-Mail Scam Targets Colleges
From the article of the same title by: Jeffrey R. Young, Chronicle of Higher Education - Students, professors, and staff members at a variety of colleges are receiving sham e-mails, supposedly from their school's help desk, asking them to reply with their log-in, password, and sometimes other private information. The e-mails are actually coming from hackers who want access to student accounts in order to send spam, and administrators are concerned these accounts could be used to damage university networks. One of the messages, sent to 2,600 users at North Carolina State University, read, "We are currently upgrading our database and e-mail account center. ... Warning! Account owner that refuses to update his or her account within seven days of receiving this warning will lose his or her account permanently." After discovering the attack, Tim S. Gurganus, an IT-security officer at the university, e-mailed other campus security administrators. "I got responses from 20 different universities saying they'd seen similar stuff," Gurganus says. "I think they started with bigger ones, like the state universities, and now they're going after the smaller schools." Colleges are stepping up efforts to inform their e-mail system users about the attacks and asking them to delete any messages that ask for passwords and other personal information.
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