Several student email accounts fell victim to phishing on Sunday, September 6. 

Because phishing is an Internet scam, it is important to disregard emails that do not represent known organizations.

“Phishing is an Internet scam and a viable means for obtaining your personal information,” said Chief Information Officer of Technology Mike Asoodeh “Please note that no respectable company would request this information via e-mail.”

One of the reasons many students of the university felt the repercussions of phishing was due to students responding to the scam. 

“Several student email accounts were compromised on Sunday,” said Asoodeh. “These accounts were used to send email to several internal addresses. Subsequently, they came upon a couple of mass mail lists. This started a volley of emails between students who kept replying to these messages.”

Currently, the Office of Technology is monitoring the phishing situation.

“Filters have been written, and the mailing lists have been locked down for now,” said Asoodeh. “We are monitoring mail at this time for any other changes needed to the filters.”

Network Specialist Mark Hemel believes that part of the reason Southeastern experience a high amount of phishing was because the university uses Gmail and Gmail is a faster service than some. 

“In this instance, the value of a university email address is the ability to send more junk mail promoting a website of their [phisher] choice,” said Hemel. “Since Southeastern uses Gmail as its email system, it comes with a lot of clout. Gmail servers are fast and come with many features to make mailing easy.”

Though it is unknown where the phishing began, the authorities are having trouble due to how the attempted accesses were coming from countries such as China, Turkey, Latvia, Japan, Russia and India. 

According to Hemel, it is not hard for people with the intent to phish to get into people’s emails using proxies or multiple computers. 

Though students were impacted by the phishing, Client Connectivity believes it was a small case. 

“All in all, I don’t rate this incident that high,” said Hemel. “When looking at the numbers, this only affected 75 user accounts versus the 196,727 user accounts we actually own. Of the accounts compromised, only five are active students carrying hours.”

Students can protect themselves from such events by filtering their own email and not giving their password to anyone as well as looking out for suspicious email.

“Students actually have the ability to filter their own email,” said Hemel. “You may filter by sender, subject or content. You may find instructions within the Gmail help. People should also look out for getting emails you did not send, your contact list has a few thousand extra email addresses in it and your outbound email has changed as well as your name.”

Another form of cyber attack people should look out for are viruses.

According to Microsoft.com, “computer viruses are small software programs that are designed to spread from one computer to another and to interfere with computer operation.”

In the future, Asoodeh hopes that students do their best to avoid future attacks. 

“Computer viruses continue to be an area of concern on campus. These threats can often be avoided,” said Asoodeh. “Therefore, we ask that you please use caution when opening e-mails and attachments.”

According to Windows.microsoft.com, several ways to protect your computer and yourself from a computer virus are to install an antivirus program, do not open email attachments unless you are expecting them, keep your computer updated, use a firewall, use your browser’s privacy settings, use a pop-up blocker with your browser and turn on User Account Control.

Also, students have the ability to monitor their accounts by checking the last ten logins on their account.

“Here is something most don’t know about their Gmail account and it’s important to look at every once and awhile,” said Hemel. “There is a link at the bottom right corner of the page when you are logged into your Gmail inbox. It’s labeled ‘details’. This will show you the last ten logins to your account with the time, date and IP address (location). If these accesses are not you, then it’s a good time to change your password.”

For instructions on how to filter your Gmail visit search under Google support or for more information on how to protect your computer from viruses visit windows.microsoft.com.