People at the University – both students and staff – can expect to receive spam emails. Although both the GroupWise mail system (for staff) and Google (for students) protect against spam, there is always a few that slip through the defences.
A specific category of spam are phishing attacks where someone attempts to deceive you into sending them information of some kind – your banking details, account details, etc. As always the advice is to not release information to links contained within an email message as the email message source may be forged and the links may lead to unexpected places.
Specifically, a link within a phishing email will take you to a site that looks very much like a legitimate site, but is in fact hosted elsewhere and the information submitted via it will be sent to a spammer. Who may use the information to drain your bank account!
However a member of the University may expect to receive phishing attacks specific to the University. Such as emails from the ‘student loans company’ requesting details, etc. We have received a number of examples of such phishing attacks, and you need to be aware that you may be targeted for these attacks.