Never send your password by email Posted on September 1st, 2008 by

I would like to pass along a short reminder to everyone.  Never send your password by email.  Gustavus will never ask you to respond to an email with your password.  Even if we did, don’t respond with your password.

What happens if you do respond to a phishing email with your password?  Chances are your account will be used to send out spam, viruses, and more phishing email.  In some cases your account will also be modified so that all email you send has spam attached to it.  If you use the same password for other systems like Facebook or Webadvisor, the evil doers may log into those locations and mess with things there as well.

Once your account is compromised, it can cause problems for the entire campus community, not just you.  For example if your account is used to send thousands of spam messages to Gmail or Yahoo, those companies will start blocking all email from Gustavus.  Now not only is your account in trouble, you have made it difficult for everyone at Gustavus to send email to others.  This has actually happened a couple of times in the past few months.

For many years we have been getting email that attempts to trick people into divulging their password.  Recently those messages have gotten a little more believable, including words like webmail and GAC in them.  No matter how real they look, just don’t ever send your password via email.

So, in conclusion, please DON’T SEND YOUR PASSWORD BY EMAIL or by any other means for that matter.

 

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