Rise in spam messages

Posted: Fri 3 Nov 2017, 11:32am.

This week has seen a rise in targeted phishing emails received by staff at the University. While many spam messages are caught by the filters run by IT Services, some will inevitably get through. According to Symantec, “More than half of inbound business email traffic was spam in 2015”.

Many spam messages can easily be identified and deleted. However, carefully prepared phishing emails (that is, messages that are sent to try to steal your personal or financial information) can be much more difficult to spot.

You can find information about phishing messages on this page on the IT Services website, and the latest threats that have been reported to the IT Service Desk are listed on right hand side of this page.

Here is some general guidance in spotting phishing emails:

  1. Be aware of the most common topics used in phishing attacks:
    1. “Your email account is being upgraded/migrated” type messages, often claiming to be from ITS.
    2. Financial messages, generally claiming that an invoice is due or that you have already sent a large payment and need to cancel it.
  2. Links in emails may not lead where they claim to lead.
    In most email applications, you can safely hover over a link with your mouse cursor without clicking on it, and the program will tell you the address it leads to. You should check what domain is listed in the link (in the address http://www.sussex.ac.uk/its/phishing, the domain is sussex.ac.uk). If it isn’t one you recognise, don’t follow the link.
  3. Don’t necessarily trust an email just because it seems to come from a Sussex email address. Addresses can be spoofed, and if another member of staff has fallen victim to a phishing attack then their email account may be used to send more attacks.
  4. In general, be suspicious of all email.

If you are ever unsure whether a message is genuine, you can forward it to the IT Service Desk – support@sussex.ac.uk – to be checked.

Subscribe to our latest news mailing list to receive email alerts of updates.