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.

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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 Identify Phishing

  1. Poor Grammar or Spelling

    Pleese advise to reply me with your private phone number and occupation. Kindly engage me about your needed financal aid status.

  2. Vagueness

    If an email is being elusive about who you are, who they are, the purpose or cause of an issue, or any resolution required… the email is phishy.

  3. Urgency

    In this phish, the scammer needs you to do something right away! These scams are brief and to the point… Send me your phone number.

  4. URLs and Phone Numbers

    Many phishing attempts will lure you into clicking a link or opening an attachment. The attacker just needs you to check a webpage (URL) or call them to resolve an issue.

If you are not sure of a link or URL, please
DO NOT CLICK IT!

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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.