Jeremy Rowley
Jrowley1@uwyo.edu
Numerous university email accounts have been exposed to an email containing an attachment with the ability to steal information off of computers.
“This is a particularly bad one, as you might expect,” Vice President of Information Technology on campus Robert Aylward said. “It essentially attempts to steal confidential data on your machine. It drops lots of adware and spyware onto the PC, highjacks the browser and changes its default settings and also seriously degrades the performance of the computer.”
This virus came in the form of a ‘.zip’ file that 500 people at the university received in their email inbox, Aylward said. An estimated 100 of these people have opened the file and exposed their computer to the hackers behind the message.
“It can take your computer over and it essentially turns it into a ‘bot’,” Aylward said. “What that means is that the hackers control your computer and can essentially do anything they want to with it.”
In addition the program can access the user’s contact list, as well as any listservs, or set of emails, they are a part of and forward the email to all the people on the lists, Aylward said. However, UW IT was able to stop some of the spread of the dangerous email.
“The one advantage we do have is once we know it’s there, we can go in and clean them out of the system – the ones that aren’t clicked on,” Aylward said. “We go in and we scan the system and delete the ones that aren’t clicked on. There was about 900 to 1000 that we cleaned, meaning that the user never saw them.”
UW IT is not a stranger when it comes to dealing with issues like this, Aylward said.
“The important thing is we block about 2 million various types of attempts to get on our network or through our filtering process in any given week,” Aylward said. “The problem is, as you can imagine there’s the one-in-a-million that gets through for various reasons and that’s what’s occurred here.”
However, students and faculty are also encouraged to be safe while online, Aylward said.
“Nothing can be done from a hacking perspective until it’s clicked on, so we’ve tried to encourage people to call IT if they suspect that there’s something wrong,” he said. “We really encourage them to be skeptical about things that just don’t look right.”
In an email sent to UW students and faculty in August, UW IT gave some information regarding phishing, also known as an attempt at acquiring sensitive information by masquerading as a reputable source.
“One of the most common forms of a phishing attack in higher education environments is official looking emails claiming to be from the university’s technical support team and usually taking the form of a message asking for your user ID and password, with a threat of account deactivation if you fail to reply,” according to the email. “These specifically crafted phishing attempts are primarily focused on gaining access to email accounts to enable them to send malicious emails to other systems with the appearance of coming from a legitimate mail system, such as UW’s.”
The email advised students to avoid these emails, as UWIT emails will never ask for an account password.
“If an email asks for your UW password, or sends a link asking for your UW password, it is not legitimate, no matter where it comes from or how it looks,” according to the email.
Lauren Mochowski, a sophomore nursing major at UW, did not find the malicious email in her inbox. However, she believes that safety online boils down to simple common sense.
“My parents were always really good about telling me not to open anything when you don’t know who it’s from,” she said. “I’ve been lucky not getting viruses on my computer because I’m kind of anal about that because you need your computer for so much, and I can’t really afford for anything to happen to it.”
Mochowski said she was shocked when she was told how many malicious emails UW IT blocks on a weekly basis.
“I think you should always know who you’re opening things from,” Mochowski said. “Even if you don’t recognize the name, if you see ‘invoice’ in the subject line, you can look back and think about if you ordered anything. I just think it’s really good to be cautious because there’s so many people out there who can manipulate you over the Internet.”
