IMPORTANT MESSAGE FROM UoD IT
Increase in number of accounts blocked
Over the past few weeks, we’ve seen an increase in the number of students interacting with fraudulent emails, resulting in accounts being blocked once again. Although the magnitude of the issue isn’t comparable to the level seen before, we’d like to proactively address it.
Specific example making the rounds
Although there will always be scams in circulation, a specific phishing email seems to be the main culprit. This scam is asking students to ‘validate their account’ and claiming to be from the IT department. We would never ask a student to ‘validate’ their credentials (unless they’ve contacted us first for a specific thing) or divulge their password to us.
The Service Desk has received many calls to question the legitimacy of this email, which is positive, but also costly in terms of resource. In most cases, a compromised applicant account has been the sender of this email, making this an obvious fraud.
Greater vigilance and better deduction/decision making is required across the board, and we accept work needs to be done to support our community in this area. This is ongoing.