November 05, 2012

Contact:   Mur Muchane

Over the past several weeks there has been a marked increase in phishing email messages on the Internet. The messages are crafted to look like official communication asking for personal information such as: username, password, birthdate, and social security number. Those messages are anything but official and are sent by individuals trying to steal your password or your online identity.

Things you should know at Davidson about official e-mail correspondence from the Help Desk and ITS:

• ITS staff will never ask for your password via e-mail or send you an e-mail suggesting you change your password.
• The Davidson network password tool requires you to already know your password. Any other tool you may see is not ours.
• The Davidson firewall attempts to identify untrustworthy e-mails as being suspicious. If you see "[Suspicious]" in the subject line of an e-mail message, do not act on anything you see in that message. Delete the message or consult with the Help Desk if you cannot determine if the message is legitimate.

How does responding to phishing messages affect you and others?

Responding to and providing personal information to phishing messages will compromise your email. Spammers will use your compromised account to send out spam to other email service providers. When this happens the entire davidson.edu domain is at risk of being blocked by service providers. The process of removal from the blocked list requires considerable staff time and, at times, days to resolve.

For detailed information on how to recognize a phishing attempt, please see:

http://www.onguardonline.gov/articles/0003-phishing