Another mercifully slow summer as admin seems to be serially estivating until the autumn. However, there is always the watchful eye of the Office of Dataprotection and Informationsafetymanagement here at the University of Not-Bielefeld, ready to leap selflessly into the void …
… only to fill it with a vacuum.
Their latest missive warns us about a particularly cunningly crafted phishing attempt going around currently that looks like this:
Let me know if you are free right now.
Thanks
No joke. That’s the e-mail. Except for spoofing the return address, the phishers have made little effort beyond that to disguise it. They haven’t even gone through the trouble of setting up a fake website to gather your data, phishing attempts that I regularly get bombarded with but never warned about. Instead, after you reply to the e-mail, we’re warned that they tell you that they are short of money and need you to purchase any of a number of online gift cards and send them the codes.
Do we really need to be warned about this? I mean, let’s take a look at the chain of brain farts required here to get reeled in:
- Failing to recognize the e-mail as a phishing attempt, despite it being anonymous, in English from a predominantly German-language university, and, sigh, containing that gaudy banner indicating that it is not even from your predominantly German-language university;
- replying to it;
- accepting the fact that online gift cards are the usual way of helping “friends” out of a financial tight spot;
- purchasing said gift cards; and
- replying again to send the codes on to the phishers.
In this day and age and at this Institute of Higher Learning, if the alarm bells aren’t ringing at (1) and absolutely deafening at (3), then I don’t know how an e-mail warning us about the scam can possibly do any good either.
But then maybe admin just needs to reassure us every once in a while that they’re still there and working hard for us …
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