The College of Western Idaho (CWI) Information Technology (IT) Department presents this series of Bert’s Alerts articles intended to share updates at CWI as well as relevant technology topics.
Spear Phishing
CWI received several spam emails this week which unfortunately led some recipients to click on a link causing their email accounts to be compromised. Once compromised, the attackers sent additional emails with more targeted information, making the communication appear more legitimate while still promoting the phishing link.
Because of these numerous spam and spear phishing attacks CWI was blacklisted with many email relay hosts, due to the larger volume of emails being sent out in short periods of time. IT has worked with these hosts to clear up the issue but it did cause delays and in some cases blocking of email sent to outside parties.
Please remember IT will never send an email asking employees to click on any link, nor will they ask for account or personal information. All emails received that request clicking on a link should be deleted immediately.
Once IT is made aware of a compromised account they can secure the account to stop the flow of email. If they can determine the account was accessed on a computer at CWI, they will retrieve that machine and re-image it to remove the possibility of any malware that could potentially cause harm.
Office 365 Migration
IT has begun the email migration and have migrated over 200 email accounts already. There have been a few issues that IT was able to work through and continue migrating accounts. IT appreciates patience with this process.