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Phishing Awareness

The Phishing Awareness Program promotes awareness, education and safety concerning phishing attacks with a goal of helping faculty, staff and students protect themselves and the university by learning to recognize malicious emails. 

What is Phishing?

Phishing scams are typically emails, text messages or voice messages that try to trick you into giving your personal information. They are also used to install malware on people’s systems.

 Targeted Personal Information 

  • Usernames and passwords
  • Social security numbers
  • Credit card numbers
  • Authentication codes  
  • Birthday
  • Employee ID

Phishing Messages

In a typical scam, the cyber criminal sends a message with the intent to impersonate a person or business you know or trust.  This message will ask you to directly reply with sensitive information or have you click a link taking you to a website to collect that sensitive information. Or, sometimes, the site will install malware on your computer or device that grabs all data you enter into your device.

Why is Phishing Awareness Important?

The university’s security tools block millions phishing messages each month, but there will always be some that make it through to your inbox. You are our best defense against these messages. Recognizing phishing prevents it from harming you, and your reports prevent phishing from harming the university community. Phishing awareness and reporting practice helps keep us alert and ready to respond to these threats.

Phishing Awareness Education

The Phishing Awareness Program's education is provided through simulated phishing emails and on-demand training.

Phishing Simulation Emails

As part of the program, Information Security sends simulated phishing emails to faculty and staff .  The simulated phishing emails imitate real phishing attempts to provide a realistic phishing experience in a safe and controlled environment. That way, when a real phishing attempt does show up in your inbox, you will know exactly what to do. 

Phishing Simulation Training

Users who have fallen for a phishing email will be asked to complete a short reminder training about phishing. 

Learn More about Phishing

Campus Specific Resources 

Reviewed 2024-08-09