It seems that scammers are now attempting to use student e-mail addresses to send out spam. 

If you get mail with the subject of “morning”, supposedly coming from a student account (studentnumber@sun.ac.za) with the following content, please ignore and delete it.

“We are conducting a  standard process investigation involving a late client who  shares the same surname with you and also the circumstances surrounding investments made by this client.Are you aware of  any relative/relation having the same surname? Send email to: scammer@scam.com”

This is a typical Nigerian 419 Advance Fee scam. Do not respond to this mail. The scammers just want to see who will respond so they can con you out of some money.

A reminder again of how to correctly report spam and phishing scams:

Send the spam/phishing mail to the following addresses: 

help@sun.ac.za and sysadm@sun.ac.za.

 Attach the phishing or suspicious mail on to the message if possible. There is a good tutorial on how to do this at the following link (which is safe): http://stbsp01.stb.sun.ac.za/innov/it/it-help/Wiki%20Pages/Spam%20sysadmin%20Eng.aspx

1. Start up a new mail addressed to sysadm@sun.ac.za (CC: help@sun.ac.za)
2. Use the Title “SPAM” (without quotes) in the Subject.
3. With this New Mail window open, drag the suspicious spam/phishing mail from your Inbox into the New Mail Window. It will attach the mail as an enclosure and a small icon with a light yellow envelope will appear in the attachments section of the New Mail.
4. Send the mail.

IF YOU HAVE FALLEN FOR THE SCAM:

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 e-mail accounts (especially if you use the same passwords on these accounts.)

IT has set up a website page with useful information on how to report and combat phishing and spam. The address is: https://blogs.sun.ac.za/it/en/2017/11/reporting-spam-malware-and-phishing/

As you can see the address has a sun.ac.za at the end of the domain name, so it is legitimate. We suggest bookmarking this.

[Article by David Wiles]

Tags: cyber security, spam

This entry was posted on Wednesday, December 13th, 2017 at 9:16 am and is filed under E-mail, Security. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. Both comments and pings are currently closed.