UvA warns for increase in phishing emails: ‘Criminals are impersonating colleagues’
The UvA has observed an increase in phishing emails in which criminals impersonate university colleagues. The university announced this on its staff website. Employees are being urged to remain vigilant and not respond to these messages.
A short message asking whether you are working from home today. Or a request to reply quickly to an email. These messages may seem harmless, but the UvA is warning employees about them today. The university has recently seen “an increase in phishing emails in which criminals impersonate a colleague,” according to a notice on the staff website.
By gathering information about employees – for example through LinkedIn – and creating an external email address under the same name, criminals can make it appear quite convincingly that they are a colleague. As a result, the messages can seem “very real,” the UvA notes. If recipients respond, the exchange is often followed by a request to purchase gift cards or to forward certain codes.
Advice
The UvA advises employees not to engage with such emails and stresses that staff members are “never approached in this way by colleagues or university services.” Anyone in doubt is advised to contact the ICT Services Help Desk.
It is possible that the increase in phishing emails is related to the cyberattack on telecom provider Odido earlier this year, in which the data of hundreds of UvA employees was also affected. However, this cannot be stated with certainty. UvA email addresses have long been publicly accessible through staff profile pages, meaning that the risk of this type of phishing has always existed.
