Anyone with a University of Georgia email account is not stranger to spam emails.
UGA Chief of Police Jimmy Williamson said the UGA Police Department sees a phishing case about once every two weeks, usually in the form of using the Internet to try and get someone’s information to set him or her up for some kind of scam.
“From a police perspective we ask ourselves, ‘Man, when is this going to stop?’” he said. “Just cause somebody asks for it, doesn’t mean you have to give it to them, even from a business perspective. Anytime somebody calls you up and they’re trying to get information, be careful.”
It may seem like a lot sometimes, but the amount of spam email promising too-good-to-true job offers and help with student loans that reaches UGA email accounts might not actually be that much.
“You simply cannot filter everything,” said Laura Heilman, security awareness training and education manager with UGA Enterprise Information Technology Services. “There are different types of spam — some of it is easier to spot, some of it is harder to spot and when you’re dealing with things like phishing messages. A lot of phishing messages come through spam filters as well and when you’re dealing with things like that. Some of them can look very legitimate.”
There are 169 billion email messages sent globally every day, 70 percent of which are spam, she said.
“If you consider the huge volume of that on the global scale and how few messages usually get into your email box, you consider that we’re doing a pretty good job,” Heilman said.
She said EITS has a heuristic filter in place for UGA email accounts set up to identify patterns and known spam IP addresses that filters about 65 million emails per week.
UGA is an educational institution and so it tries not to block too many messages that might be relevant, said Jimmy Williamson, chief of the UGA Police Department.
For example, 23 percent of phishing attacks and even more spam comes out of China, but with UGA professors and exchange students from the country that email with friends and family back home, the University cannot simply block all messages coming from the country, Heilman said
Additionally, UGA is never going to send an email asking for credentials like usernames and passwords, as it’s technically possible for these messages to be intercepted — a security risk, Heilman said.
However, the nature of spam mail and malicious online phishing has changed.
Both are gradually moving to social networks, and spam sent over email has actually dropped three percent since the beginning of 2013, she said.
Olivia Stallings, a sophomore criminal justice major from Atlanta, said she had a friend whose Facebook was hacked and sent her a spam link. She clicked it not knowing it was spam and then her account started sending spam messages to her friends until she changed her password.
“It was probably dumb, but whatever I thought it was from [my friend],” Stallings said.
Felipe Moreno, a junior marketing major from Bogotá, Colombia, said he’s also received spam messages from friends’ Facebook accounts, but didn’t click them because the friends warned him not to.
Williams said phishing on social media sites is not always direct either, as people may be able to steal identities by piecing together information through various conversations and pictures online.
“It’s not a matter of if your identity is stolen, but it really is becoming a matter of when your identity is stolen,” Heilman said.
There have been four or five times when her identity has been stolen or compromised in the last five years, she said. It’s important to understand that spamming and phishing are moving to mobile devices as well, Heilman said, which is a “huge concern.”
Williams said if the offender does something with the stolen information, then the police try to identify them and make an arrest, but until that happens there’s nothing they can really do.
“There’s just so many things, as a consumer out there, you just got to be very leery, whether you’re buying, selling, who’s calling you with information,” he said. “You got to show a lot of caution and check a lot of things — don’t be so forgiving of information. If the deal sounds too good to be true, more than likely it is.”
Although only about three percent of spam is malicious, Heilman advises not to open email attachments, especially if they’re from an unknown sender, as opening it can execute malicious software.
“All it takes is one click,” she said.