Wartburg sees increase in cybercrime attempts

The amount of phishing attempts at Wartburg has increased since 2007, director of Information Technology Services (ITS) Gary Wipperman said.  

Wartburg is not alone in the rising amount of attacks.  According to RSA, a company that provides security solutions for businesses, phishing attacks around the world increased 66 percent in 2008. 

“We are getting a lot more of those attempts. I don’t think last year we had more than a handful, and this year we’ve had quite a few of them,” Wipperman said.

While the some of the phishing attempts affect the entire campus, smaller groups of people on campus have also been targeted. 

Wipperman said ITS has worked to notify the Wartburg community of problems.

“We’ve tried to communicate to faculty, staff and students to be leery of these types of things.  Often times these are not very well put together, and you can tell by misspellings or language in there that it is probably not a legitimate request,” Wipperman said.

ITS sends e-mails to faculty, staff and students to warn them against widespread phishing attempts; however, these notifications are not always successful.

“We often get responses from people that say ‘I can tell it is a phishing attempt, don’t tell me that.’ But yet, we still have people fall for it. So you don’t know who to warn and who not to warn. So we try to blanket everyone,” Wipperman said. 

ITS can also block things that look like phishing attempts; however, Wipperman said they have to be careful not to block legitimate mail like messages from Ebay requesting users give their username or password.

“We can try and put code into our filtering system that tries to stop those from going through.  That works to some degree, but there are always ways around that,” Wipperman said.

With the increase in phishing attempts, Wipperman said the best way to prevent problems is to never give out personal or login information.

“Any reputable place is not going to ask for your username or password,” Wipperman said. 

Phishing attempts do not typically have viruses attached.  Problems only arise when people respond to the attempts, Wipperman said.

“If you ever do answer one of those and give them some of your information, your accounts are probably compromised and you’ll need to get a hold of the legitimate institution as soon as possible to let them know what happened. Then they can help mitigate the adverse effects,” Wipperman said.