Universities Represent Most Suitable Targets for Spammers

According to the reports published in THE MANITOBAN on November 18, 2009, universities globally are being attacked by phishing scams that prey on both students and employees as the scammers defraud them into revealing their private details chiefly usernames and passwords of their school Web-mail accounts.

Steve Hillman, IT Architect at Simon Fraser University (British Columbia, Canada), explained that phishing, which could be of various forms, was a practice to obtain Internet users' user IDs and passwords so that their systems could be illegally accessed, as reported by THE MANITOBAN.

Hillman said that banking phishing, for instance, went after passwords and bank accounts while the identical theft happened with credit or debit cards. But in the case of universities, the scammers went after the login credentials of people's e-mail accounts so that those accounts could be used for spamming purposes.

Phishers frequently target universities since they held a large scale e-mail accounts, vast data pipes with hardly any limit to outgoing e-mail; consequently the accounts could dispatch several thousand e-mails in a short time-period, said Hillman.

However, a majority of universities maintain various safeguards to prevent junk e-mails though there is no danger that every message will be caught. On several occasions, police along with authorities have charged malicious e-mail spammers of allegedly targeting universities.

In one instance, two brothers from Missouri (USA), who had spammed across the nation against students, faced accusation from federal judges in the city of Kansas together with more accomplices during April 2009. Apparently, those who investigated the case said that the gang's activities over the period since 2002 harmed 2,000 or more universities and colleges in the USA, and yielded around $4 Million.

Commenting on the problem, Internet security specialists suggested that considering the type of e-mail used, universities could specify as to what number of messages an e-mail account could send per time-period to help block inbound spam.

Conversely, if teachers as well as students supervised their accounts every day while recalling the addresses they sent e-mails to, it could help them identify genuine university e-mail from spam, they stated.

Related article: University Reports Increase in Spam

» SPAMfighter News - 12/1/2009