Student and faculty emails in danger due to phishing

A select number of UNO student and faculty emails have been under constant attack by phishing emails that appear to be messages sent directly from the university.

Phishing emails are emails that try to get a user’s personal account information by posing as a company or large organization. Because these emails can be sent many times to large quantities of people at once, phishers can easily send many attempts in a short amount of time to try and hack into accounts.

While some phishing emails are easy to spot, filled with spelling errors and suspect sending addresses, others look much more believable to the unsuspecting eye.

“A lot of the emails that you’ll see will look fake, they’ll have a lot of misspellings…or have names of departments that look strange that we don’t even use. Some are getting really good though,” said Juan Enriquez, the director of user training at the UNO information technology department.

The emails pretend to come from the University of New Orleans and will usually direct the reader to another site. The email will also ask for login information due to a security concern of some sort and will urge you to act quickly.

“The main thing is that we never ask you for a password or an account,” Enriquez said. “If somebody in the email is asking you to go to a site outside that email then it’s most likely fake--or phishing.”

“Pay a little more attention to those emails that seem a little weird.”

Even with some of the poorly done scam email attempts, there are some that can look relatively legit. In those cases, always beware of links that attempt to direct you towards outside sites.

“Emails that come out of Information Technology, 99 percent of those emails will never have a link,” Enriquez said. “We will try to tell you how to get there, but we’re not going to give you a link to follow.”

Most links can also be manipulated to appear to belong to a certain company or organization's website, creating the perfect visage for unsuspecting users. The best option is to manually type in the website and navigating that way instead of following a link directly embedded in the email.

UNO’s security system has a massive list of accounts and emails that have been marked as spam and cannot be sent to other UNO emails. It’s difficult for the system to capture every attempt, however, and some attacks are able to slip through and potentially trap students into releasing their personal login information.

If you have been a victim of these emails, the first move is to change your password as quickly as possible and the spam emails should stop.

If the problems persist, or if you think your account has been compromised any further, see the Help Desk immediately.

Should you find a email that you recognize as fake, send an email to abuse.uno.edu so the account can be flagged by UNO’s security system and blocked from potentially attacking other students or faculty members.