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Notification of Server Breach Mistaken For Phishing Email
netbuzz writes "Educause members and 7,000 university websites are being forced to change account passwords after a security breach involving the organization's .edu domain server. However, some initially hesitated to comply because the Educause notification email bore tell-tale markings of a phishing attempt. 'Given what is known about phishing and user behavior, this was bad form,' says Gene Spafford, a Purdue University computer science professor and security expert. 'For an education-oriented organization to do this is particularly troubling.'"
Email issued by a university vice-president. Not surprised he doesn't know anything about common email frauds. He probably verbally dictated it to a secretary who took notes in shorthand and later typed it into the computer. The email has no spelling errors, a dead giveaway. What's his email address? I think a prince from Nigeria may have some good news for him soon...
Shutting down free speech with violence isn't fighting fascism. It IS fascism!
True but by including links in the email it raises suspicion on the validity of the email. This is not dissimilar to the recent email sent from Twitter regarding accounts being compromised.
A better approach is to provide information in the email indicating that people should visit the website to change their password, but not include a link, then place confirmation of the issue on the website landing page so as to confirm that the threat is real.
You may think me a tired, old, cynic. I'd have to disagree about the tired bit.
We've hacked into X's web server. Unfortunately, that doesn't give us access to their user/password database. We can, however, capture information posted via HTML forms. Please use X's website to change your password. You'll be expected to enter your current password as part of the process. Thank you for your cooperation.
"National Security is the chief cause of national insecurity." - Celine's First Law
When I get such mails that I suspect of being a phishing attempt (and as almost anyone on this planet, I'm receiving at least several of those every single day), I ignore them. The mail in question I'd likely have ignored for that exact reason: suspected phishing, ignored and forgotten by the time my finger has left the button.
Most of the phishing mails that I receive purport to be of services I've no connection with (I don't have a hotmail or yahoo mail account, for example). They're easy. Others pretend to be from sites where I do have connection with (e.g. gmail), they're harder to distinguish but it's rather safe to assume they're fake, too. Only when I read about a breach on an independent site, like /. indeed (which I trust as in not being related to phishers), then it'd be time for action. If I were to follow your advice, and go to the web site the phishing mail pretends to come from, I'd spend my whole day changing e-mail passwords.
The only mails that I'd recognise as real, would be if they use my complete name, preferably including middle name, when addressing me. Not "dear e-mail user", not "dear wvmarle@gmail.com" or "dear wvmarle". PayPal for example is doing that very well, and that's so far the only way I would believe those mails to be real. And still I'd not use a link provided in those mails, just to be sure.
Or if you think your software is up to date, and your plugins are click to play, just click the link and then check if the domain name is correct.
Riiiiight. If your Java software was up-to-date then you're only looking at a dozen or so zero-day exploits that can slip right past your 'up-to-date' plugins. Or how about the Adobe Reader zero-day that Adobe recommends turning on protected mode for everything until they fix it. That software is up-to-date as well.
If you want to copy & paste a link, do it into NotePad and not a browser. Why play chicken? If you're already suspicious then be smart instead of trying to outsmart the phishers.
BTW, if you're counting on your up-to-date plugins to stop things, you'll be not-so-pleasantly-surprised when the zero-days are fixed and the A/V companies have something new to look for. If the plugin vendor doesn't know about the hole then it's doubtful that the A/V companies know about it either.
We got one of these notices at our university. After trying to determine if the message was spam we decided it was likely real, but suspicious due to the link to a 3rd party website that redirected to educause to reset the password. I ended up going to their website and calling the number they listed there (which was different from the one given in the email) just to verify that the email was legitimate before we entered information into the webform.
The link to reset the password in the email went to educause-domain.informz.net that redirected to net.educause.edu. This particular email did seem a little suspicios
I want users to be suspicious and skeptical of emails with strange links. I want them to not completely trust emails that purport to be from their system administrator.
In other words, the portion that didn't immediately follow the email's instructions are to be praised, not harangued.
I am officially gone from
Except that in this case the domain name portion wasn't to the "right" website, at least if the article's "the embedded link went to a third-party site with 'educause' embedded in the URL along with a sequence of meaningless characters" claim is correct.
Occasionally, one of my banks or health care orgs calls me on some (legitimate) business.
The first thing they do is ask me for my identifying info (SSN, birthdate, etc).
See, their security and privacy regs require them to verify my identity.
I always refuse, and try to explain the problem to them.
In the early days (going back maybe 5 years),
they had no idea what I was talking about,
and I could not get them to understand the problem.
Eventually, some of them understood that they had a problem.
But their understanding of the problem was that some of their customers wouldn't talk to them,
which meant that they couldn't complete the business at hand,
which mattered to them (or else they wouldn't have initiated the call in the first place).
Their solution?
Offer me a call-back number, so that I can call them instead.
Because, see, if I initiate the call, then they must be who they say they are, right? Right?
Just once in the last year, I had a bank that really understood the problem.
When I balked, they allowed that I could call back in on the customer service number *on my credit card*.
So I did.
From the reactions of the people who answered,
I got the impression that few of their customers do this.
Michael Sinatra over at seclists.org had the following to say:
This should be a lesson to all of us, since EDUCAUSE is definitely not alone here: We all do regular, legitimate business in ways that is sometimes indistinguishable from phishing, at least to regular users. That needs to stop. Email marketers and analytics junkies will not like to hear this, but we need to put an end to embedded email links that are redirected through other systems. IMO, we should put an end to *all* legitimate links in emails; instead have a business portal with all of the links to surveys, training sites, etc., and have notification emails for when new things appear on the portal. In addition, we could modify our SSO sites so that they alert users when they need to take care of something that we would normally use email for which to notify the user. Once that's done, we can assure users that we will NEVER ask them to click on a link in an email, just like we currently remind them that we never ask them for passwords.
If that is "too hard" and/or the analytics stuff is "too valuable" then we need to simply accept the risk that our users will get caught in phishing attacks. The bad guys have figured out that it is very easy to mimic our business practices, and they have gotten very good at doing it. Unless we change those practices, they will find us to be easy pickings.
A couple months ago I was informed, in an email that had absolutely every telltale sign of being a phish (other than mispellings, I suppose; it was written in proper English), that someone had probably stolen my card, and I should click on this link if I agreed, or this other one if I had made the charges. The links didn't go to the bank's site. I almost threw it away.
It was a legitimate email; my card had actually been stolen.
I emailed their phishing department with a copy of it, and a pointed "this looks like a phish. I know it's legitimate, but here are all the ways it looks like it isn't. Perhaps you should rethink this email you're sending out?" Their response: "this is not a phish". Yes, I know that. I SAID that. Apparently nobody in that department can think, or read? (Fun fact: this is coming from one of the "big four" banks, according to wikipedia.)