Category Archives: Active Attacks

Posts relating to attacks that are currently under way.

Phishing Attacks Against Academics with an Interest in Russia/Ukraine

Posted on 2022-08-18 by mike

We have been alerted to the activities of a politically-motivated phishing “crew” targeting (amongst others) the Higher Education sector with particular reference to academics with interests in Russia and Ukraine. The attacks look to be targeted to specific individuals with … Continue reading →

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An Email With An Encrypted ZIP Attachment?

Posted on 2022-03-03 by mike

That’s suspicious! At least it is if the password to decrypt the ZIP file is contained within the email – when you’re sending something secret you would send an encrypted ZIP file as an email and then send the password … Continue reading →

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Spam: Mail Quotas and Bitcoin

Posted on 2021-02-22 by mike

Recently we have become aware of an issue in relation to one of our cloud service providers which is weakening one of our email security measures – specifically the mechanism put in place to make it harder to impersonate UoP … Continue reading →

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Dodgy .ac.uk Web Sites

Posted on 2020-10-15 by mike

No, we not talking about real .ac.uk web sites but fake ones. We have recently been alerted to the activities of a certain well-known attacker (the “Silent Librarian”), and whilst processing it I noticed something it might be helpful to … Continue reading →

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Twitter: The Trustworthiness of The Blue Tick

Posted on 2020-07-17 by mike

If you have not heard, Twitter suffered some sort of incident recently (yesterday at the time of writing) where a number of high profile accounts were used to send out “tweets” suggesting that if you pay them some money (in … Continue reading →

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The VPN, Facebook, and China

Posted on 2020-07-16 by mike

We have had at least two reports that some people logged in to our GlobalProtect VPN are also logging into Facebook, examining their current Facebook logins and finding that they’re unexpectedly logged in from China (or Qatar). This is not … Continue reading →

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Who Is mikemeredith@hotmail.com?

Posted on 2020-05-01 by mike

Short answer: No idea! And yes that is my name. We have received a couple of reports of phishing attempts using look-alike names – in this example (which isn’t real), the email address mikemeredith@hotmail.com was used in an email purporting … Continue reading →

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Security At Home

Posted on 2020-04-15 by mike

As most of us are now working from home, it is time to consider security in the home; because you are working from home, security at home is important to the university (in addition to yourself). Indeed there are new … Continue reading →

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Scams In The Time of Coronavirus

Posted on 2020-03-26 by mike

(with apologies to Gabriel García Márquez) As expected, scammers are trying to take advantage of fears over Covid-19 (the Coronavirus) to push their victims into unwise actions – often for profit. I have already seen two scams announcing UK government … Continue reading →

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‘;–have i been pwned?

Posted on 2020-02-10 by mike

There is a well known “white-hat” web site called “‘;–have i been pwned?” which :- Publicises large data breaches of personal information. Collects data breaches looking for compromised accounts. Allows people to check if their own account has been compromised. … Continue reading →

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