Clicking on a phishing link can have a multitude of serious consequences for the university including infecting your devices with malware, having your account used to spread spam, scams, and phishing or even ransomware. To spread awareness, and help you easily identify messages that might appear to be legitimate but aren’t, Trent IT adds an external warning to any message that doesn’t originate from inside our Office 365 staff/faculty email system.
When reviewing messages in your inbox, please keep the following in mind:
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Never open an attachment or click a link in a message that you were not expecting.
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Never assume a message is legitimate based on the sender – Email can be easily forged to appear to be from anyone or may be sent by someone who has had their account compromised in the past.
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Think before you click – Most email-based scams are designed to trick you into acting on impulse. They contain tones of urgency or indicate that if you don’t act quickly, you will miss out on a good opportunity or lose access to your account.
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Verify the legitimacy of any message that asks for personal information or talks about account actions, making payments, financial information or fines and fees.
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Consider the context of the message – Messages appearing without context, opportunities that emerge suddenly or messages from officials that seem out of place are all good indicators of a scam.
Additional information
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The email notice is applied on all messages that originate from outside the staff/faculty (Office 365) email system. Currently, this includes messages from the student email system, Gmail. Trent IT is aware of this, and as we work to harmonize our systems this will be removed from student messages.