Phishing Scam Targets UI Students, Asking For Account Information

According to the University of Illinois' CITES (Campus Information Technologies and Educational Services), it is alerting the university students of an e-mail scam and asking them not to reply it, as it attempts to steal their password and account information.

According to CITES, an online scammer is distributing fraudulent e-mails purporting to be from the university and telling students that they should provide updated username and password of their e-mail account. CITES further reported that similar phishing scams had targeted the university students earlier too.

CITES said that the students of the university have been trapped in a dangerous phishing scam. phishing involves sending phony e-mails to capture people's private details. In the current case, the online scammers are trying to secure students' e-mail information to subsequently access their accounts and possibly find e-mails with financially sensitive data.

Reports received so far indicated that approximately 600 fraudulent e-mails or phishing e-mails have reached students across the campus.

Moreover, as per the reports, during 23-25 August 2008, seven students made the mistake of answering the fraudulent e-mails; thus, giving away their bank account, credit card and e-mail information.

Meanwhile, apart from alerting the students and preventing them from being trapped in the phishers' ploy, CITES experts are applying their own methods to lessen the distribution of the fake messages.

Brian Mertz, Communications Specialist of CITES Security, commented that the university had blocked every outbound e-mail from the phishing e-mails, as reported by Dailyllini on August 26, 2008.

Further, according to Mertz, a phishing e-mail is easy to spot by looking for grammatical and spelling errors in it along with finding suspicious addresses. He also added that the university would never seek passwords or account information from students via e-mail.

Moreover, while Security Officials at CITES feel that phishing attacks are frequent on university campuses that is a serious issue. With faults in the scam e-mails such as spelling errors that a reader can readily pick out and recognize the messages as phishing, the scam still seems to be yielding results.

Related article: Phishing With A Redirector Code

» SPAMfighter News - 9/2/2008