Cybersecurity

Preventing Phishing and Spoofing Attacks

Learn more about phishing scams and how you can protect yourself and Spring Hill College. 

Phishing Attacks

Phishing attacks are emails disguised as being from a legitimate source that attempt to get the receiver to reveal sensitive information. Phishing attacks are common at all businesses, and colleges and universities are no different.

Spring Hill College uses Google Workspace as our email platform which offers several tools to protect us from phishing attacks but no method is perfect. If you receive a suspicious email – do not open it or click on any links. Please immediately mark the email as SPAM in the Gmail interface. 

Spoofing

Spoofing is a type of email impersonation to trick the receiver into completing an action. The display name that shows in your email account is easy to change. Bad actors can change their display name to be from a person or company you know and trust (like your bank or the college president). The easiest way to check for spoofing is to hover your mouse over the sender’s display name. The email address the message was sent from will pop up and you can determine if it is from a trusted source. 

Also look for 

Key Things To Check:

Phishing and spoofing attacks can be successful if just one person in the organization clicks a link, downloads a malicious attachment or completes the task from the phished email. We have to be vigilant as a community to keep ourselves safe from phishing attacks.

Recognizing Phishing and Spoofing Attempts

The message...