Email Spoofing

The University recently experienced an increase in email spoofing. Spoofing is sending email that appears to be from one person, but in fact was created and sent by another. This activity is frequently employed by senders of spam or junk email. These emails are sent in the hope that you will open it or respond. Since the messages appear as though they came from a campus sender, the junk mail filter does not catch it. That means you may find more annoying junk in your Inbox – possibly even from yourself.

For the most part, email spoofing is just an annoyance. However, occasionally legitimate corporate accounts are spoofed (e.g., eBay, Wells Fargo) in an effort to obtain account numbers, passwords, or other sensitive information. These messages should be treated with extreme caution to protect your identifying information.

LTS is in the process of tuning the spam filter to catch more spam. It takes awhile to get it just right because of the variety of spam received. Users can create an Outlook rule to delete/junk any internet email with “@uwec.edu” in the FROM line. This will not affect email that is sent on campus; it is not scanned because it’s behind the spam filter.