Phishing Scam Targeted at University Students
Sophomores - forget temporarily about stress related to studies. The University at South Bend, Indiana believes you’ve got more things to worry about. The American university has sent out a warning to all its students that its computer network might be the target of a scam campaign.
It has advised all its students not to fall for a phishing scam that would try to elicit their account information at the private network in the campus.
The students are being alerted that they might receive fraudulent emails supposedly from the IT department asking them to reconfirm their account details. The risk of such a scam going through increases because the mails do everything to pretend as if they are from the college network administrator.
The University believes that the scam is basically targeted at their network servers. It feels scam artists might be eyeing all the free space available on the hard disks of the servers. These could be used as a hiding place for such contraband as sex movies or pirated stuff like games, movies and software.
If lucky, the fraudsters can also make use of the financial details of individual students for their gain. Scholarships, financial aids, personal funds can all be manipulated to effect fund transfer and thus fill their coffers.
Users of EBay among the university students would be especially at risk. Using their legitimate EBay account identities, scamsters can conduct illegal transactions involving fraudulent buying or selling deals at the site. When these transactions go bust, it would leave the student with a lot of explaining to do.
The latest scam is refreshing in one way. It has an innovative idea as its goal: Why waste money on building up and maintaining costly servers when with a little effort you can use the abundant free space available in University campuses. For a scam operator, it saves the trouble of:
- Wiring up & maintaining a network that he/she can check in/out 24hrs-a-day.
- Risk of exposure. It is the university which will have to answer for the illegal stuff stored in the network.
For the fraudsters, these incentives have proven to be too tempting to resist!
<!--adsense-->
Related posts: