What is "Phishing"?

"Phishing" is a kind of tricks employed by spammers and malicious hackers who normally send out a huge amount of junk messages using impersonated or completely fake email sender addresses. A phishing email message attempts to lure you into surrendering personal information by falsely claiming to be a legitimate organization conducting legitimate businesses. In some cases, the message itself could come with viral attachments. It may also divert you to a fake web site which looks identical to the genuine one.

What has ITSC done and what should I do?

A portion of phishing emails are detected by the spam detection engine installed at our email servers. In addition, the campus border firewall will block against access to malicious web sites contained in phishing emails identified by IT security vendors. However, as one may expect, such kinds of technologies can hardly be 100% effective and phishing email is still regarded as a major threat in the foreseeable future.

To protect yourself and the University, in case you suspect that you have received a phishing email, do not respond to it nor click on the links.

You are also advised to check against samples of phishing emails at our web site from time to time.