(no subject)

[guinevere33.livejournal.com]

The stupidity of my colleagues with graduate degrees continues to astound me. Our tech services folks have been sending around emails and posting flyers for several months with the following:

Yale ITS will NEVER ask you to send information about your account like passwords or other sensitive personal information via email. When ITS does send messages on behalf of the University, we always provide a link at the bottom that confirms the authenticity of the message by taking you to the official Yale Messages website.

Yet today, I get this in part of an email from a friend:

Has anyone else gotten an email today from Yale's ITS webmaster asking for your name, email, password, etc to be replied to a UCLA email, or if you don't your email will be deactivated? I'm wondering if this is another phishing attempt, but the webmaster email looks legit (webmaster@yale.edu). What have other people done?

Seriously? SERIOUSLY? I give up.

Comments

[mouser.livejournal.com]

Ask for their credit card information to verify before you'll answer them.

[pyxiwulf.livejournal.com]

I LOLed

[userunknown.livejournal.com]

We once had someone get phished RIGHT AFTER sending out a security warning. The guys excuse?

"The messages were contradictory".

[canray.livejournal.com]

Pedo-Van FTW!

[ptstech.livejournal.com]

They need this:

[amatyultare.livejournal.com]

Argh. Working for an ISP, I've come to hate phishing scams not because of the security risks, but because the day a phishing email comes out, I always get thirty calls along the lines of, "So I got this email...and it asked for my username and password...and it said that if I didn't respond my account would be deleted, which doesn't sound right, and there's no mention of it on your website...and there were a whole bunch of misspellings and grammatical errors...so, is it legitimate?"

On the plus side, once I get them to shut up and tell them that it's fake, delete it, etc, the call goes really quickly, so my handle time goes down. Yay irrelevent yet important-to-management numbers!

[jokergirl.livejournal.com]

I always get this urge to tell people to go ahead.
But I'm not really that evil.

*sighs*

Sadly.

Also, it'd probably end up with me having to clean up the mess.