No one likes to be scammed, especially if you are a student who is already working your way through school. So on Feb. 27, Seton Hill University’s (SHU) computer information technology (IT) department sent a warning e-mail to all students concerning possible phishing attempts to gain access to student’s passwords and other confidential information.
No one likes to be scammed, especially if you are a student who is already working your way through school. So on Feb. 27, Seton Hill University’s (SHU) computer information technology (IT) department sent a warning e-mail to all students concerning possible phishing attempts to gain access to student’s passwords and other confidential information.
Brian Dawson, a SHU network and web services employee, created possible fake phishing content embedded in the body of the warning e-mail to give students an idea of how such attempts to gain information might look.
“When Seton Hill University CIT Department makes any announcements we will have one of our signatures on the bottom of the message that will include a team member’s name, university name, title, and contact information,” wrote Dawson in the warning e-mail titled “Email Security Alert.”
According to Wikipedia, phishing is “the criminally fraudulent process of attempting to acquire sensitive information such as usernames, passwords and credit card details by masquerading as a trustworthy entity in an electronic communication.”
Molly Huffman, a senior, said, “I was a little surprised that SHU’s IT department sent out an e-mail notifying us against phishing scams because I have not received any such e-mails. I wasn’t, however, surprised at the fact that they sent the e-mail because I expect that protecting us against scams and viruses is part of their job description.”
With recent phishing attacks on popular social networking sites such as Twitter and Facebook, students are now more knowledgeable in how to prevent such scams in the future.
In efforts to avoid scams and viruses, Christine Scholl, a junior, said, “I generally ignore suspicious e-mails, and never give out my information.”
Daniel Usher II, a senior, said, “I learned about [phishing] scams a long time ago since I am a computer science major and had a computer job in the army. I would imagine that people who are not very computer savvy would be more susceptible to such scams, although ‘phishing’ is not limited to the computer world.”
However, even with students looking out for themselves in the virtual world, new scams are made everyday along with traps that are made to copy legitimate e-mails or password queries.
Mary Rose Dimmey, a sophomore, said, “I was aware of scams on the internet but I didn’t hear about phishing scams until the SHU warning.”
Alex Riggenbach, a sophomore, said, “I once had my World of Warcraft account hacked, but whether that was because of phishing or something else, I never found out.”
“I’ve recieved those emails that say you have a great uncle in Austria that wants to send you $10,000 and all they need is for you to pay them $300 first. I just feel like it’s common sense not to participate in that. Although when I saw the example phishing e-mail that the IT department sent out, it made me a little nervous because it looked so much like something SHU would call official. Now I’m afraid that I won’t trust some of the things I should and vice versa,” said Huffman.
For students like Tyler Carter, a freshman, phishing taught him a hard lesson when first stepping into the World Wide Web.
“Once, when I was like 13, on MySpace account, it got a virus that destroyed my computer,” said Carter.
It is also typical for college-aged students to have at least one account on a social networking or online shopping website, even if not all of the accounts are used regularly.
“I have an old account on MySpace that I barely use, but I use Facebook quite a bit. I also have an account on Second Life, which is like a live-action social networking site where you can create your own avatar and interact with other users directly in a virtual world,” said Scholl.
“The only real social networking site I have an account with is Facebook. The last time I listed something on Craigslist I got a lot of scam e-mails, and I have seen viruses that people get from MySpace,” said Usher.
Recent years have seen online companies tracking down suspicious e-mails and possible phishing attempts to their source and taking legal action against the phishers. In 2007, California resident Jeffrey Goodin was convicted to serve 70 consecutive months in prison for his phishing scam pretending to be from America Online’s billing company.
Although warning students and other young users to constantly be on alert for phishing scams and their ilk in the future, it is unlikely that such criminal acts will no longer happen. As long as there is a poor guppy in the sea to take advantage of, there will probably be a shark looking to empty said guppy’s bank account.