Welcome back to campus to all returning students and a great big welcome to our incoming students, the class of 2023!
We refer to the first two months of the Fall semester as phishing season. Cybercriminals are aware of the Higher Education academic schedule, and take full advantage of the early semester rush and the influx of new faculty and students in order to bombard community members with a wide variety of malicious emails.
Since late August we have seen a large increase in malicious emails, including the following:
- Extortion emails
- Fake invoices
- Impersonation
- Attempts to change Direct Deposit
We are guaranteed to see more over the coming weeks and we depend on the community to report these issues swiftly by sending an email to catchoftheday@vassar.edu
Now would be a good time to brush up on the different types of emails we receive and review some of our best practices:
- Impersonation emails: http://pages.vassar.edu/catchoftheday/2019/06/28/suspicious-emails-impersonating-vassar-personnel-2/
- Invoices with malicious attachments: http://pages.vassar.edu/catchoftheday/2019/04/03/ach-notification/
- Unsolicited Google Doc sharing: http://pages.vassar.edu/catchoftheday/2019/03/27/docx-docx-shared-via-google-drive/
- Employment fraud: http://pages.vassar.edu/catchoftheday/2018/05/07/a-message-personal-assistant-at-dres/
- Best Practice: enable Duo: http://pages.vassar.edu/catchoftheday/2017/06/29/best-practice-enabling-multi-factor-authentication-with-duo/
- Best Practice: use a Password Manager! Vassar College is happy to offer LastPass Premium for anyone with a vassar.edu email address or LastPass Enterprise for employees. Find out more from our Service Catalog: https://go.vassar.edu/servicedesklastpass
Stay safe and keep sending those suspicious emails! We review each email and we always respond. Send them along to catchoftheday@vassar.edu