Students at UW-La Crosse have recently received a barrage of spam emails asking for usernames and passwords.
Tracing spam artists and finding specific people or businesses that attacked this institution proves to be extremely difficult. They continuously change their emails to make them appear to be legitimate.
“The people that send the spam messages are brilliant; they know what they’re doing,” Jim Treu, the Information Security Officer at UW-L, stated.
Out of the thousands of spam emails that are attempted, only a few get through the lined up defenses.
“When someone is crafty and formats a message in a way that Google doesn’t have the tools to identify it, it makes it through,” Treu said.
The UW-L Information Technology Services uses Google and Google’s spam filtering tools.
Treu said that the spam service is “very intelligent.”
“Google learns every time someone hits the spam button in Gmail, it will start automatically filtering those emails into spam,” he elaborated.
Treu works with other ITS employees to make sure students are aware of what official ITS emails look like so when the few spam emails get through, they know to not give personal information.
“What we try to do as IT is to make the campus aware and always be diligent in knowing what they’re logging into and what they’re putting their information in,” Treu said.
After the ITS employees do their job, it is up to the students to decipher whether or not the website is trustworthy. In most cases, the spam can be stopped with a simple change of a password, but there are other risks that go along with giving out personal information. The spam artists are criminals.
“It’s a group that are in it for their financial gain… They slowly get people to log in, they can sell people things, there’s a ton of things that can happen and it’s all based around theft,“ Treu said.
The few spam emails that have gotten through directly represent the number of students that have fallen victim to these crimes. About a dozen students have walked into the hands of the criminals and most of the time realize their mistakes soon after.
Some questions to ask before giving personal student information:
– Is it part of the uwlax.edu website?
– Is there an ITS stamp at the bottom of the email?
– How does this email compare to IT branded emails?
– Is it from a uwlax.edu email address?
Treu stated that IT will never send emails asking for students’ usernames or passwords and will never link to a non-campus affiliated website. When in doubt, contact the Eagle Help Desk to verify an email’s validity. If a student receives a spam email, they can hit the stop sign button in Gmail to report spam.