What is Phishing?
Phishing is a bogus or malicious email sent to you in order to steal usernames, passwords, personal information, and other sensitive data by masquerading as from a trustworthy entity. With a phishing email, the scammer pretends to be a credible source in order to trick you into (unintentionally) giving up personal information or providing your access to a system at UofL.
There are many different types of phishing. We try to filter out most known phishing attempts but can't catch all of the lures sent to your @louisville.edu email. It is very important to learn how not to get hooked or bite onto the wrong clickable link.
Email Phishing
In this type of email scam, the attacker will register a fake domain (sender’s email or web address) that mimics a real organization. The phony con artist can also format the email’s headers to look like the inquiry comes from a trusted source.
Spear Phishing
Spear phishing emails are targeted to a specific individual. By gathering easily accessed, online information about you, such as name, job position, role at UofL or area of study, the attacker will use the data to their advantage in the email.
How to Report Phishing
Report Phishing
Select the Email > Report> Report Phishing
This option is for when you believe it is a phishing attempt. This will send it to us for investigation and manual remediation.
If you see an email subject such as: "Issue with Payment" and the email is asking you to send money, call them, or submit your card information, it may be phishing. If it is, then reporting as phish would be the better option.
Report Junk
Select the Email > Report> Report Junk
This option is for marking an email and its sender as "junk." Emails are sent to junk so that they do not clutter up one's inbox and senders marked as junk do not give notifications when the email arrives.
If you see an email with a subject similar to: "Check out these cool t-shirts!" This is most likely general spam, so reporting this as junk would be the best course of action.
Phishing or Spam?
It is often tempting to report every unwanted email as phishing. Reporting emails that have automatically gone to your junk, or reporting spam as phishing sends these for manual review. Therefore, reviewing emails that are junk, unwanted, or spam overwhelms the system and is an inefficient use of security personnel productivity. Instead empty your Junk folder often.