We have had many reports about a recent influx of targeted phishing emails to UCL inboxes, in particular with 'Announcement' as the subject header and a spoofed 'from' address as 'webmaster@ucl.ac.uk'.

Please be aware that no member of UCL staff should ever ask you for your password nor ask you to send your password by email. Even if the email states that unless you reply your email will break, any email that does ask you to reply with account and password information should be considered a scam. Our advice on this is that you should treat your password as you would treat the PIN number for your bank card keep it secret and do not share it with anyone, not even your friends.

Genuine emails with regards to Web Services at UCL or Webmail, Squirrelmail and even UCL Live email, will NEVER ask you for your password.

Further information:

Email is very much like receiving junk mail through your door - the 'To'

address on the envelope will be you, and there will probably be a return address of the company sending the unsolicited item. Inside the envelope will be a generic message, probably personalised with your details.

With email all you see is the inside of the envelope - which can be trivially forged or spoofed.

Basically all of this information:

[examples]

> -------- Original Message -------- Subject: {SPAM?} Work offer inside

> Date: Thu, 21 Jun 2012 11:21:57 +0100 From:

> <a.name@ucl.ac.uk>, <another.name@ucl.ac.uk>

To:

> <a.name@ucl.ac.uk>, <another.name@ucl.ac.uk>

is not to be trusted.

Nor is

> -----Original Message----- From: University College London

> [mailto:webmaster@ucl.ac.uk] Sent: 13 January 2013 05:23 To: Name,

> User Subject: Announcement

>

> Dear subscriber..............

No one in UCL should ask any UCL user, for their password, whether in an email, in person or over the telephone. Any email requesting username and password, such as this phishing email, should not be replied to.

You can report each individual spam and phishing email to Actionfraud.org - follow their online instructions. This does [eventually] make a difference.

A lot of these spam emails do get stopped by spam filters but unfortunately some of them still get through. If the spam filter rules are too strict it would result in legitimate mail being flagged as spam, but you as an individual, can use the junk filters on your email client to block out certain email/IP addresses.

Any links you see, may not be genuine, even if the email looks initially to be from here. If you hover over an URL with your cursor, you can usually (don't click) see what the path actually is.

Our UCL Information Security training is online (there is also an interactive game to help to learn to identify phishing emails and you should hover over our link here to see that it is genuine):

http://www.ucl.ac.uk/isd/common/cst/secure_systems