Phishing Scam Targets Employees and Students of UT

(Austin, Texas), USA-situated University of Texas (UT) has cautioned employees and students of a phishing e-mail campaign aiming at them. Keyetv.com published this dated September 5, 2013.

Layne Brewster, a University official reports that the scam has victimized many employees. According to her, they mistook the fake e-mail as a department of the university's communication, although it was really from someone trying to steal personal information. Keyetv.com published this dated September 5, 2013.

Brewster said the information wanted was typically name, SSN (social security number), birth date and bank account.

Teaching Assistant Rachael Weison of UT has been receiving numerous e-mails daily, but according to her, she knows the means for keeping scammers away from her account. Keyetv.com published this dated September 5, 2013.

Weison says she has encrypted every e-mail in her account so scammers can't tamper with them. Ideally, it helps to stop incoming spam mails routed to the encrypted e-mail ids.

Experts at UT investigating the currently spreading e-mail scam observed that lawful organizations similar to the UT academic institution didn't request to send personal information over electronic mail. Therefore, any campus inmate feeling doubtful about an e-mail's authenticity should directly contact the university, the university recommended.

Moreover, such e-mails should be reported to authorities such as the Federal Trade Commission and the Internet Fraud Complaint Center both of which worked towards halting spam, phishing as well as other Internet exploitations. The reporting was necessary when one might feel he had been duped with an abusive e-mail, UT suggested on its authorized online site.

Unfortunately, it's not the University of Texas as the only academic establishment that became the target of an e-mail scam, during recent months. UTSA (University of Texas at San Antonio), during the early part of April 2013, also had its staff and students targeted with a phishing e-mail campaign. Avast a security company detected those e-mails that were captioned "Your e-mail will expire soon" as well as whose sender's address seemed to be an authentic UTSA id namely customerservice@utsa.edu. Recipients of the e-mails were directed for making their account details up-to-date before the accounts' expiry.

» SPAMfighter News - 9/14/2013