Sep
16
Are you getting a lot of bounced messages when you try to send email to folks who have Blackberry devices. (Dr. Ward for example.) Twice in the last few days, Blackberry has blacklisted any email from wm.edu because the college servers are flooding the internet with spam.
Update: I spent an hour in a spam-related meeting earlier this morning. Seems the problem was much worse than I had heard earlier. Nine faculty accounts were accessed, the messages may have been in the millions and it will be 48 hours before we can get mail to some ISPs. Watch for more spam news on a station near you. Gene
It actually doesn’t take much to set off the chain reaction that essentially cuts us off from the email universe. All of us have gotten these very formal looking email messages purportedly from officials at IT threatening to cut of our access to the internet if we don’t click on a link and enter our user id and password. Unfortunately, those email messages NEVER actually come from IT–they come from such attractive characters as spammers, zombie armies or botnets.
But, in our busy lives, it’s easy to forget those messages–that actually do come from IT–that say not to respond to those messages. So last night, four unknowing individuals–probably exhausted from preparing grant applications–clicked on a link, entered in a valid userid and password, and handed over the email accounts to spammers.
Instantly those accounts were taken over and used to send out thousands or hundreds of thousands of spam messages. When the software used by the major ISP’s–like Blackberry, Cox or Comcast–sense these spam attacks–they automatically block all the mail from those domains. Getting off those blacklists is pretty complicated and requires human intervention from IT engineers. Until these issues are fixed, no email gets delivered.
The take-away. No matter how professional and official the email looks, never respond to a message that says click here and enter your user id and password. It won’t be from IT.
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