Posted: Mon 9 Apr 2018, 4:20pm.
Systems / Services Affected: Emails sent to Hotmail, MSN, live.com and outlook.com addresses. You may receive a warning message that your message has been delayed. Our systems will continue trying to send your email.
Date / time: Ongoing
Reason for issue: Microsoft have identified Sussex as sending large amounts of spam email to their addresses.
IT Services change/incident number: 363048
Contact the IT Service Desk for support:
Visit us in Shawcross
Log a support ticket online
Call us on 01273 678090
UPDATE: 13 Apr 2018 - 2:12pm
As we’ve previously reported, if you try to send emails to Hotmail, MSN, live.com and outlook.com addresses you may receive a warning message that your message has been delayed. Our systems will continue trying to send your email.
However, after a certain number of attempt the system will stop trying to deliver your message. If this happens you’ll receive an email from our servers telling you that we were unable to deliver it.
We are working to resolve this situation but we are dependent on Microsoft’s email filters.
UPDATE: 16 Apr 2018 - 12:01pm
We are continuing to monitor the rate at which emails are being successfully delivered to Microsoft email services (Hotmail, Outlook.com, MSN.com). The rate of delivery has improved over the weekend.
The cause of the rate limiting arises from large amounts of spam email being routinely sent from Sussex addresses. Our priority is to ensure an unmonitored, uninterrupted email service for the University, which means that we are limited in the steps we can take to tackle this problem. Any measures implemented by IT Services to prevent spam arriving in your inbox, or that would stop Sussex accounts from sending spam mail, would potentially also block or filter genuine messages.
Phishing messages are currently a problem for all high-profile academic institutions. These messages:
- Claim to be from a genuine, trusted sender. Often this will claim to be from IT Services or the Finance department.
- Suggest that something is wrong and you need to take action. For example, your email account is shutting down or you’ve made a payment that you didn’t mean to make.
- Provide a link to solve the problem.
The link will take you to a genuine-looking website, however the URL in the address bar will be wrong. You’ll be invited to enter your login details. If you do so, your email account will be hijacked and used to send spam email, and your files and systems are accessible to the criminals who sent the email.
You can find advice about avoiding phishing attacks on the IT Services website at sussex.ac.uk/its/security
UPDATE: 18 Apr 2018 - 2:37pm
We are continuing to monitor the rate at which emails are being successfully delivered to Microsoft email services (Hotmail, Outlook.com, MSN.com). Some emails sent from Sussex addresses are now being blocked entirely. If your email is blocked you will receive a notification message.
Microsoft are acting in response to the volume of spam messages sent by Sussex addresses. There has been a significant increase in the number of Sussex user accounts being used to send spam email. This is normally because users have given away their login details to phishing emails.
Please be vigilant for possible phishing emails. You can see the latest attacks that have been reported to the IT Service Desk on the IT Services security page.
We are continuing to monitor the delivery of emails to Microsoft services (Hotmail, Outlook.com, MSN.com). All emails sent from Sussex addresses are currently being blocked by these services.
Microsoft are acting in response to the volume of spam messages sent by Sussex addresses. There has been a significant increase in the number of Sussex user accounts being used to send spam email. This is normally because users have given away their login details to phishing emails.
Please be vigilant for possible phishing emails. You can see the latest attacks that have been reported to the IT Service Desk on the IT Services security page.
