September isn’t just a busy month for students, but spammers and phishers also increase their activity during this time, according to ITS.
Jeffrey Gardiner, central information security officer with Information Technology Services, says spamming and phishing activities see a spike in September to target incoming students.
“We have first-year students coming in, for example, that haven’t been acclimatized to Western,” Gardiner said.
“They’re new here – maybe they haven’t ever thought about clicking on links and so I think it’s just something that the phishers themselves have chosen to do – increase the number of attacks.”
Gardiner believes one motive for phishing attempts on Western students is to gain access to Western’s paid resources.
“For example, our library system pays millions of dollars for their online journals and if your credentials are lost, the most common result is that those credentials are used to harvest online journals,” he said. “That costs the university money.”
WesternOne cards are also targets as they are linked to students’ meal plans, Gardiner added.
Currently, spam mail and phishing attacks are filtered through both Microsoft’s anti-spam system and Western’s native anti-spam system. Western’s filter works on a ‘spam value’ system that flags emails that include certain phrases or display particular behaviors such as sending great volumes of emails with the same subject line.
Gardiner added that the increase in spam and phishing messages that get through to the Western community’s inboxes are not connected to the recent change in email servers from Convergence to Office 365.
For more information on how to avoid falling for phishing emails, visit cybersmart.uwo.ca.