spam

The campus is being targeted by malicious phishing e-mails falsely claiming to be from the IT Support Centre. The e-mails urge campus account owners to reply and provide user IDs and passwords to avoid account deactivation. These e-mails are not authentic. If you receive one, do not reply or provide information. Delete the e-mail.

If you responded and sent information, please call IT Service Center during regular business hours at 303-735-4357 (5-HELP from a campus phone).

Following is a sample message:

The Office of Information Technology (OIT) has received reports that several public e-mail services, such as Yahoo and AOL, are currently blocking the receipt of university e-mail containing @colorado.edu in the address.

This is an action often taken by public e-mail providers when they receive spam due to a phishing outbreak, such as the one that occurred over Labor Day weekend with university e-mail.

In the past week the campus spam filters have begun blocking a growing number of e-mail messages from Yahoo.com accounts as the number of spam messages from Yahoo servers has increased significantly. The campus’s filtering of e-mail from a specific server is based on reputation and the Yahoo reputation score has decreased to a point that many reputation-based filtering services, including ours, have begun applying a higher level of filtering.

The campus has recently been targeted by a number of malicious e-mails that appear to be attempts to gain user information such as passwords and bank account information. One recent phishing e-mail was supposedly from Wells Fargo and another related to closing webmail accounts. Individuals who received these e-mails should simply delete the messages.