Phishing scam gets Rice e-mail blacklisted

Phishing scam gets Rice e-mail blacklisted

BY B.J. ALMOND
Rice News staff

E-mail from the Rice University mail server was blacklisted temporarily this week as a result of six students falling prey to a phishing scam.

The students innocently provided their passwords in response to phishing e-mails designed to look like messages from Rice Information Technology. Spammers then hijacked the students’ e-mail accounts to send out thousands of e-mails. The large volume of electronic mail coming from rice.edu addresses caused Rice University to be added to a list of known spammers. Consequently, a number of Internet service providers (ISPs) blocked e-mail from Rice.

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Marc Scarborough, Rice’s information security officer, and his staff have been contacting various ISPs to alert them about the problem and request that Rice be removed from the blacklists. “Some respond instantly, and others have an automatic time-out period of 24 to 72 hours before they’ll remove someone from a blacklist,” Scarborough said.

Like Rice, a number of businesses and institutions rely on a combination of resources to filter the delivery of spam to their e-mail server, Scarborough said. They create their own list of mail servers to block, subscribe to a real-time blacklisting service and/or invest in intelligence software that can help screen spam.

Phishing e-mails are messages that fraudulently attempt to acquire sensitive information, such as user names, passwords and credit card information, by masquerading as e-mail from a trusted source.

“We track the different phishing attacks targeting Rice very carefully,” Scarborough said. “We act very quickly to block mail to and from an e-mail address if we see that someone has responded to a phishing e-mail, but the six students who recently became victims shared their passwords before we were able to intervene.”

Once Scarborough’s staff determines that a Rice user has replied to a phishing e-mail, the user’s e-mail account is locked and the password is changed so that the phisher can no longer access the account. Scarborough works with the Help Desk to notify the user, who must contact IT to get the new password before they can start sending and receiving e-mail again.

Scarborough said phishing e-mails have become much more sophisticated. “They look like e-mails that Rice would send out, and they even use our Web mail server address,” he said. “But everyone at Rice should know that we would never ask you to send your password in an e-mail or direct you to a site asking you to type in that information. When you get taken in by such scams, the entire university pays the price because of the blacklisting consequences.” 

Rice e-mail account holders who receive a notice that an e-mail they attempted to send was blocked by a spam firewall or blacklist should forward it to help@rice.edu so that Rice Information Technology can contact that ISP to request removal from the blacklist.