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Phishing E-Mail Solicits Account Details From UA Students

According to news reports coming in from the University of Arizona (UA), it is thought that almost every student's computer is contaminated with a virus, malware or any other malicious code that attempt to hack into the personal information of these students.

Reports also said that computer viruses like My Doom, Bagel, The Love Bug, Money Tree and Detnat might have hit the students' systems, according to security investigators and analysts.

Also, security experts describe these malware variants and computer viruses as the carriers of deception and thievery, capable of monitoring activity, gathering information and damaging vital data.

Security analysts further said that computer viruses often change their form as a result it is essentially on the users' parts to keep themselves protected. The viruses make way through social engineering that exploits humans' trust, state researchers and analysts.

Furthermore, as per the reports, with the new semester is only some weeks old at UA, it appears that almost every UA student has received an alert e-mail about phishing attacks seeking their account username and password.

And while giving some hints to the university's students to distinguish a phishing message from the university e-mail, UA's Senior Information Security Specialist Kelley Bogart said that a lawful e-mail like the university's Web mail would never ask to reply with any confidential info like user ID and password. The university already has that information and so the students would never receive e-mail requiring them to reveal such type of data, as reported by DailyWildCat on September 9, 2008.

Additionally, Bogart advises students as well as staff to exercise caution when the information of users' account or financial data is requested. He acknowledges that one reason why it is almost impossible to detect a particular worm in e-mail and runs a scan along the user's inbox is that the whole process is very complex.

Another way that security researchers and analysts suggest that help in differentiating a malware-laden or phishing e-mail from a legitimate e-mail is that the first type of e-mail would definitely contain some grammatical errors.

Related article: Phishing With A Redirector Code

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