Phishing scams are when a fraudulent email is sent to an individual or company pretending to be from another company in an attempt to trick people into giving up personal information. Scammers send countless emails to CWU students’ Outlook accounts throughout the year in hopes of gaining access to their CWU accounts and taking vital information such as bank information and addresses; or with the intent of spreading viruses.
The CWU Service Desk sent out an email as recently as Nov. 4, 2024 to warn students to be vigilant, as a large spear-phishing campaign, by a threat known as “Midnight Blizzard,” has been attacking educational institutions since Oct. 22 of last year.
Spear-phishing and phishing are similar in that they are both emails that are sent out with the intent of tricking someone into giving up personal information. However, spear-phishing attempts to use a more targeted and personalized approach. This is done by sending out emails with the purpose of making the message sound as if it’s coming from the school.
According to a poll taken from 44 CWU students, 86.4% have received some kind of phishing scam email to their CWU Outlook account. Out of 44 people, approximately 38 of them have received some variation of these phishing emails.
Of these 44 students, 6.8% of them said that they had mistakenly clicked on one of the links that was included in these emails. Every student reported that there were no lasting repercussions from doing so. When the question arose of if these emails looked believable to the students 57.1% of students responded no and the other 42.9% responded yes.
CWU’s service desk included a graphic in their email with tips on how to “keep yourself safe”. Some of these tips include being wary of unknown senders, looking at the time that the email was sent, checking to make sure a hyperlink is safe – without actually clicking on it – or seeing if the content of the email matches up with the subject and actually makes sense.
The issue of phishing emails has plagued CWU, and many colleges, system’s for years. CWU sends out numerous emails every quarter to warn people of these phishing scams, but the emails just keep coming.
Phishing emails have the possibility of seriously endangering the safety of CWU students’ personal information. The issue of phishing emails is long standing, and has been proven to be difficult to combat on an institutional level.
