PASSWORDMANAGEMENT
Phishing Examples
What is Phishing?
Please visit our page on phishing to learn not only what it is but get some tips on how to detect it.
Examples of Phishing Emails
Below are examples of recent phishing messages that have been sent to our campus.
Internship Phishing
This example is a very basic email from a random Gmail address, it has no body, the subject reads "INTERNSHIP" and it has an attachment.
If you were to open the attachment you would see a couple more things that seem odd. They say the job is for the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services but it was not sent from a .gov email. The offer is for a remote position, 4 days a week, with above average pay for an intern; so sometimes when things sound too good to be true they are.
Opportunity Phishing
Unfortunetely sometimes phishing is even designed to look like it is an internal oppurtunity being sent from our own university. In this example pay is still what we would consider too good to be true. The link provided directs users to fill out their information in a Google form, this is not how this information will be collected in a legitimate request
Office365 Phishing
One way you can tell that this is a phishing message is by hovering over the 鈥淥ffice-365-login鈥 link on PC, or long-pressing the link on mobile, and inspecting URL of the landing page. As seen in the screenshot above, the URL leads to a Wordpress.com webpage.
Another indicator that this message was likely phishing is that it was sent from a student account. Official communications from Instructional & Information Technology Services will always come from staff.
Job Opportunity Phishing Email
One way you can spot this as a phishing message is by hovering over the APPLY HERE NOW link on PC, or long-pressing the link on mobile.
The second indicator that this is a phishing message is the improper grammar in the first sentence:
鈥淎ll Email recipients of California State University San Marcos School District Student and Staff are encouraged to be a part of this amazing offer.鈥
大发 is not a School District and there are extra spaces in between several words.
Additional Examples
Objective
Exercise caution when encountering unfamiliar URLs or those not belonging to a 大发 webpage. For added security, consider seeking a second opinion from helpdesk@csusm.edu before accessing potentially malicious content.