Be Vigilant Against Phishing Attempts

OIRT constantly monitors our network for new phishing attempts and implements rules to prohibit these messages from being delivered to our email system. We catch and delete over 90% of phishing emails before they reach our community. However, we can never catch 100% without blocking a percentage of legitimate emails. So, it is vital that our community ensure every email is legitimate before responding.

While the threat of phishing attacks is always high, around the holiday season, we see spikes in activity, and so far, this year is no different. Bad actors will often ask for personal email addresses. This is a ploy designed to move a victim away from our controlled environment. FDU will never ask for your personal email address or ask you to respond using your personal email. Please check the source of emails before responding. Some messages claim to be coming from a member of our community but actually come from external email domains. These messages are easy to spot as we include the [External] tag in the subject line of any email message originating from an external account.

Over the past weekend, multiple phishing messages were falsely claiming that a university alum was giving away free electronics and musical instruments from their late husband’s estate. Another phishing attempt was inviting people to participate in a holiday raffle. Although these messages claimed to be coming from our community, they were from an external domain.

Information To Help You

Please review our phishing tutorial below to familiarize yourself with additional tips to detect phishing emails.

If you have encountered a phishing email that you would like to report, please visit the link below:

Additionally, do NOT accept a Cisco Duo multi-factor authentication challenge if you are not attempting to log into one of our systems. If you receive a Duo authentication challenge and you are not attempting to access an FDU system, there is a good chance your password has been stolen. It is common for a scammer to attempt to log in to an account multiple times in the hopes that a student will accept the Duo challenge to stop the repeated and annoying requests. Instead of allowing the scammer access to your account, please change your password and contact the University Technical Assistance Center at (973)-443-8822 to report that your account was potentially compromised.

See also