In the first month of the fall 2011 semester, we’ve seen multiple phishing scams tailored specially for UD. Two of them looked like they came from PNC bank, one looked like it came from Bank of America, several of them claimed to contain a link to an urgent news item for the UD community, and several claimed UD people needed to submit their usernames, birthdates, and passwords to “fix” their UD email accounts.
Examine email carefully. If the message claims to have a UD connection, do the email addresses and links all contain udel.edu? (not udel-edu.net!) No legitimate organization will ever ask you to confirm personal information by clicking an embedded link or by asking you to send personal information via email.
Copies of specific scams will be posted at this site. Below are examples of recent notifications we’ve published for the UD community.
- IT reports that new phishing scam targets UD students (UDaily, 9/23/2011)
- Don’t get hooked by a phishing scam (UDaily, 10/21/2010)
- New phishing scam hits UD (UDaily 3/8/2012)
My son showed me this message about phishing scams – is the student population proactively informed through email about these scams as soon as they are identified, or do they have to check this website for updates?
If there are no proactive alerts, then I don’t believe that the majority of students will actually check here for alerts.
We post news about the worst phishing scams to our twitter feed (twitter.com/itatud) which is also repeated on our facebook page (www.facebook.com/itatud), our home page (www.it.udel.edu) and our support center’s home page (www.udel.edu/help).