As many of you know, we had problems with email yesterday (specifically, issues with sending email to off-campus addresses).  A lot of email sent in the morning was delayed for up to several hours, and some of it bounced back as undeliverable even through the afternoon.This occurred because a person with a CC email account fell victim to a phishing scam.  The person received a fake email with a link claiming that their username and password needed to be verified by IT.  After following the link and submitting their CC username and password, the email account was hijacked and used to send out hundreds of thousands of email scams.

The sheer volume of these caused the delays yesterday morning, and while we quickly disabled and changed the password on the account to prevent more messages from going out, we were blacklisted by several major email providers.  We worked yesterday afternoon to clear ourselves off as many blacklists as possible, but some will not remove us for a certain period of time (notably, hotmail and msn accounts for 72 hours after the block began).

Until the blacklist is lifted on Thursday morning, you will not be able to use your CC email account to contact anyone at a hotmail or msn address (there may be a few others as well). If you need to get an important message out to someone with one of these addresses, you’ll need to use a different email account you may have through gmail or another outside provider (or contact the Help Desk and we can assist you by sending from our gmail account).

An important reminder – you should never share your username and password with anyone, especially over email or in an online form.  All messages asking you to “verify” your login information or requesting this information for other purposes are always scams.  A legitimate organization will never directly ask for your username and password.

We highly recommend looking through our “protect your computer” section on the Help Desk website.  It is only getting more and more important to be aware of the threats which are out there and how to protect yourself from them: http://helpdesk.coloradocollege.edu/index.php/tips-and-how-to/protect-your-computer/