Students recently have noticed scam emails in their Catmail asking them to reconfirm their account information.
Some students recently have noticed scam emails in their Catmail asking them to reconfirm their account information.
Ohio University’s Office of Information Technology is aware of the issue and is warning students to “practice safe computing,” Sean O’Malley, OIT’s communication manager, said.
“Those kind of emails are a daily appearance,” O’Malley said. “Many get filtered out, but sometimes they’ll make it through Microsoft scam filters.”
Individuals have been hacking for as long as the Internet has been around, and scam emails are just one of the ways hackers try to steal people’s information, O’Malley said. The industry term for that is phishing, he said, and it is designed specifically to steal people’s passwords.
“The most recent place where we noticed an uptick in the number of scams was last month, and it wasn’t just us,” he said. “Hackers were trying to coincide with tax season, so scammers start sending more emails to try to steal people’s credentials.”
Daniel Newell, a sophomore studying mechanical engineering, said receiving scam emails in Catmail isn’t anything new for him.
{{tncms-asset app="editorial" id="f582dca8-faa7-11e5-bc57-07a921508f2c"}}
“I’d say I get probably three or four a month,” Newell said. “You can usually tell, especially when it asks you to give personal info. I try not do what it says.”
O’Malley said there are a number of precautions students can take in order to determine if an email is a scam.
“Usually the signs of a scam is, No. 1: It’s unsolicited, meaning you didn’t ask for it,” he said. “No. 2: It usually has a scary or urgent subject. It’ll be something that’s designed to put you on edge or make you worry, like a threat that your account will be disabled.”
O’Malley said scam emails often will include generic language designed to make them appear legitimate.
“It will be signed with ‘security office’ or ‘the IT team,’ rather than something official,” he said.
If a student isn’t able to conclude whether an email is phony, O’Malley recommended hovering over the link and making sure it ends in ohio.edu and doesn’t include anything “long and cryptic.” The best thing to do if a student still is unsure is to simply delete the email, he said.
“When in doubt, throw it out,” O’Malley said.
Want to wake up to the best news stories of the day? Sign up for our newsletter here
If a student knows the email is a scam, students also can forward the email to security@ohio.edu for OIT to examine. O’Malley recommended students only use their Catmail password for their university accounts.
Many students are already in the habit of ignoring emails from unfamiliar sources.
“I don’t pay attention to stuff I’m not involved with,” Dylan Denner, a sophomore studying computer science and engineering, said. “If it’s out of the blue, it’s usually a televised sign to me to stay away.”
Ren Chernich, an undecided freshman, also avoids reading emails she doesn’t recognize.
“I mean, shady emails, you just ignore them,” Chernich said.
@Jonny_Palermo
jp351014@ohio.edu
