Additional Email Phishing Protections Added Ahead of Break

Thu, 21 Dec 2023 20:17:00 -0500
project, security

We have noticed a large uptick in phishing emails over the last few weeks, and this trend is being reflected nationally throughout higher education. It is also expected that these emails will increase over the coming week based on what other universities are experiencing. These emails range from threatening to expose secrets, asking for information, demanding bitcoin, or pretending that your account will be turned off if you don't reply, and many of these look as if they are sent from a user's own account.

To that end, I've conferred with faculty and staff shared governance leadership and we are putting some additional protections in place to quarantine these emails so they don't reach anyone's inboxes.

This is the next step in protection from the warnings we added to messages identified as phishing back in late November. We will be monitoring this situation over the break, but we believe making this change will help prevent people's inboxes from being flooded by these messages going forward.

If you have any questions or concerns, please feel free to contact me directly, I will be checking my mail throughout the break.

Thank you all for the patience as we try and stop these attacks, and I hope everyone has a wonderful break.

Damian Doyle

Deputy CIO, Senior Associate VP and Interim CISO

Division of Information Technology - UMBC

damian@umbc.edu