The phishing scammers are at it again!

in Featured, Information Security, News, Tips
January 13th, 2014

As described last week in a BU Today article, members of the BU community were recently victims of phishing; and IS&T has again received several reports of a phishing message being received by members of our community like the one below.

January 14 Phishing Attempt

 

We believe the scammers are trying to use the fact that they were successful last time to continue and extend their crime. The message to watch out for claims to be from BU Security and talks about protecting you from the evils of phishing. You can tell the message is a fake because it claims to be from BU, and even uses the BU logo, but it is pointing you to a link that is not a bu.edu link.

A real BU link will always have “ .bu.edu/ ” in it. There is always a dot before bu and a slash after edu, as shown below.

Other things to watch out for:

  • If you are prompted to Web Login, make sure it is the authentic BU Web Login page which begins with https://weblogin.bu.edu/something
  • Remember that BU will NEVER ask you for your password or ask you to “verify” it; nor would any other legitimate business or institution. It is important that you safeguard your passwords and never give them to anyone.

For more good ways to detect phishing, go to: www.bu.edu/infosec/howtos/how-to-detect-phishing/.

Additional information on phishing is provided by IS&T at www.bu.edu/tech/phishing.

Making your spam/phishing filter more effective
Mail that is clearly spam is filtered for you, automatically. However, one person’s spam might be another person’s research project, so other messages are simply tagged as suspicious and then allowed to go through. You can decide how to handle suspicious mail that does get through, following the tips for Managing Spam provided by IS&T at www.bu.edu/tech/comm/email/unwanted-email/spam/.

Report phishing
If you see a phishing message, please send it and full headers to abuse@bu.edu. For details on how to do this, see www.bu.edu/tech/comm/email/unwanted-email/report-abuse/.