Campus faces IT scams

On Oct. 1, students and faculty were warned of an e-mail hoax that was going around campus.

The e-mail hoax was a “phishing” scam, which involves scam artists who try and get a person’s personal information, such as credit card information or other sensitive information through e-mail and advertisements online.

“People will try all kinds of schemes to try to get you to reveal personal information over the Internet,” chief information officer for information technology Kathy Gates said. “You should never give out such information, and more generally it is good to be very skeptical about these kinds of messages.”

The warning that was sent to students and faculty was the result of an administrator’s Yahoo or Gmail account being hacked by an intruder.

The subject of the e-mail is “trouble,” and it was sent to students from the administrator’s Google or Yahoo e-mail account. 

It talked about the administrator making a trip to the United Kingdom and then losing his bag with his passport and credit cards in it. The administrator needed money for a plane ticket and hotel bills.

When Information Technology became aware of the scam, they added a mechanism that erased e-mails from olemiss.edu accounts responding to the hoax.

“This is a specific way that we added protection for this case,” Gates said. “But we won’t always be able to do this, so it is critical that students and employees are aware and do not respond to these kinds of messages.”