University Accounts Face Increment in Spam

The faculty and student at Springfield's University of Illinois (UIS) have been recently receiving huge spam mails every day. More recently they received a series of messages advertising sexual medicines.

According to university officials, a batch of 30-40 e-mail users who reported to UIS about the increasing spam, said that they recently received additional 2-10 spam mails on a daily basis.

It has been observed that the spam messages increasingly managed to pass through the filters. This boost of messages does not relate to the overall increase in the number of normal e-mails but fluctuations or spikes have been found that is likely spam.

One student said that he observed a rise in spam to his mailbox over the past two weeks and that about 3-4 spam mails now arrived in his mailbox per day against 1-2 every month. Students further reported that a few of the spam mails showed subject titles as "Don't let anyone laugh at your small wee-wee again" and "I can't believe it, but it got bigger."

While it is not yet known how many students received the spam mails, many were able to escape receiving them because of the spam filters at the university. The university says that if a URL has numerical numbers particularly, at the start of the address, then it probably is false.

Beth Ann Bergsmark, Director of University Information Services said that UIS was planning to increase spam filters in the coming two weeks. But, with this increase there would be chances of blocking legitimate e-mail looking like spam messages but are actually not so, as reported by thehoya on March 18, 2008.

Earlier in September 2007, a surge of 250,000 spam mails hit the e-mail system of the university, forcing to set a NetID login that was used for more than a day. Responding to the situation, UIS workers in joint effort with engineers from Sun Microsystems, the technology developer brought about an improvement in the security of the e-mail system.

Besides, universities across the world are falling victim to 'spear phishing'. More recently similar a phishing attack targeted San Francisco State University in the second week of February 2008.

Related article: University Reports Increase in Spam

» SPAMfighter News - 3/27/2008