Beware Email Phishing Schemes!

Email phishing schemes continue to catch several Andrews University email users each week. Those creating these emails are using increasingly clever methods to fool people into giving out their usernames and passwords. One of these methods is to create messages that are very similar to actual emails sent by the University. In the last couple of days, messages with a subject line of “Re-confirm Pay-Roll For October” were attempted to be sent to Andrews University emails. Most were captured in the University’s spam filtering system and would be visible only in the Quarantine message unless the email user released them to their email.

This spam filtering system only processes email from servers not in the Andrews system–email from Andrews addresses would not be in the Quarantine email unless they are sent from off campus servers. If you do see messages that appear to be from Andrews in the Quarantine email, they are very likely to be coming from someone impersonating an Andrew’s user and would most likely be malicious.

The following are important guidelines to help avoid falling for these schemes:

• Do not release questionable messages (such as messages about payroll coming from a non-Andrews email address) from your Quarantine or if you must, treat them with great caution.
• Be very wary of clicking on links in emails. If possible, verify that the actual link is not different from what is displayed and make sure that it is a valid Andrews link (let your cursor rest on the link without clicking and see the actual link in a popup window or status bar at the bottom of the  window). Even safer would be to go find the website yourself rather than depending on the link in the email.
• If you are unsure, ask for advice. You may contact your PC Support Specialist or the ITS Helpdesk (helpdesk@andrews.edu; ext. 6016) if you are uncertain about an email.

Thank you very much for being alert in avoiding these schemes. This will reduce problems for you, save many hours of work for ITS staff in removing spam email generated by those misusing Andrew’s usernames and passwords and help prevent University emails being blocked by other sites.

Sincerely, 

Lorena Bidwell
Chief Information Officer
Information Technology Services