The university is in the middle of a serious spear-phishing attack and is the direct target of a group of criminals who have registered and set up a South African website to fool university users into providing their e-mail addresses, usernames and passwords.
Undoubtedly the same criminal cartel is now using e-mail accounts that were compromised in the last attack. (This time a senior lecturer at Stellenbosch Campus) The registered a South African domain name and have disguised the website to look like the university’s WebMail Login page.
Spear phishing is an email-spoofing attack that targets a specific organization or individual like the university and is not typically initiated by random hackers, but by perpetrators out for financial gain. As with emails used in regular phishing expeditions, spear-phishing messages appear to come from a trusted source. This case a sun.ac.za address. The apparent source of the email is likely to be an individual within the recipient’s own company — generally, someone in a position of authority — or from someone the target knows personally, thus its potential danger.
It is important that you do NOT click on any of the included links in the mail or enter your username or password. You should never do this at any time, as Information Technology would never ask you to do so!
Just because the mail looks legitimate and the web page *looks* like it is genuine, does not make it so.
If you have received mail that looks like this please immediately report it to the Information Technology Security Team using the following method:
Send the spam/phishing mail to help@sun.ac.za
If you did click on the link of this phishing spam and unwittingly give the scammers your username, e-mail address and password you should immediately go to http://www.sun.ac.za/useradm and change the passwords on ALL your university accounts (making sure the new password is completely different, and is a strong password that will not be easily guessed.) as well as changing the passwords on your social media and private email accounts (especially if you use the same passwords on these accounts.)
Please be careful out there. These criminals are now targeting the university, no doubt based on their past successes. Keep alert and on the lookout.
[Article by David Wiles]
Tags: phishing