I am writing with regard to recent instances of “Spear Phishing” emails – messages that appear to be from an individual or organization that you know, but are actually from hackers attempting to illegally obtain personal information such as credit card numbers, financial information, passwords or other information.
Most of us at the College have access to confidential and private information that the students and employees have entrusted to the College. While the College, through its administrative systems and processes, controls access to this data, you are granted access to information you require to carry out your duties via your College computer credentials (username and password). All of us share a responsibility to keep our passwords secure and confidential.
The College has seen an increase in the number of nefarious attempts to obtain access to your credentials via emails that ask you to click on a web link and provide your username and password. These links are an attempt to gain access to College information. Clicking on these links can also trigger unauthorized activity that can reconfigure your computer to now send all of your keyboard activity or web activity to a non-authorized off campus third party. This is referred to as “malware” or “viruses”.
It’s important to remember that Niagara College’s ITS department or other Niagara College staff will NEVER send unsolicited requests for your College username, passwords or other personal information via email or text. Messages requesting such information are always fraudulent and should be deleted. These messages are always spear phishing attempts to obtain unauthorized access to your account. Some of these emails can look very convincing and sometimes they look like they come from the ITS Help Desk, other College colleagues and sometimes senior management. As mentioned before, they are always fraudulent.
While the best way to deal with these is to simply delete the email, if you would still like to notify someone, please forward it only to the ITS Help Desk ([email protected]). They will block further activity to the linked website so others at the College cannot accidently access this site. Note, if you are using a home computer reading email, any website blocks put in place at the College will not work for you so extra care is needed.
As this activity increases, over the next few weeks the ITS Help Desk will be posting these fraudulent emails on the ITS web site (its.niagaracollege.ca) as well as sending a ITS Alert via campus notice each time we are aware of a phishing attempt at the College.
If you have any questions regarding this notice or any other computing questions, please contact the ITS Help Desk at [email protected]. As always, please practice safe computing – when in doubt ask before you click.
