Friday, November 15, 2013

Spam Report 11/15/13

Earlier this morning, the Help Desk received the first report of a series of spam emails being sent out to Faculty, Staff, and Students on campus regarding an update to the email system and requesting users please "update their passwords".  As can probably be guess, this is a fraudulent email, and should be promptly ignored.  At the bottom of this post is a write up of how we determined this email to be fraudulent.

As always, whenever you receive a message you think might be a phishing email, err on the side of caution and ignore it.  If you ever aren't sure, call the Help Desk at 253-535-7525, and we will be glad to help confirm or deny it.

If you responded to the email and provided any information, please do the following:
  • Update your epass password at http://epass.plu.edu
  • Update your password on any sites where you used that password (i.e., if your epass was the same as your bank password, update your bank password as well)
  • Log into your Gmail and sign out of all other sessions; to do this, scroll down to the bottom of the page and look for the section which says "Last Account Activity"; click on the "Details" link; a window will appear which will let you force sign out all other sessions.
If you need assistance with any of these steps or have questions about the phishing email, please contact the Help Desk at 253-535-7525 or email us at helpdesk@plu.edu.

A beautiful example of non-sense spam, all prettied up with color coding!
Click to enlarge.