Information Technology Services

 Phishing is the fraudulent process of attempting to acquire sensitive information such as usernames, passwords, and credit card details by masquerading as a trustworthy entity in an electronic communication. Phishing schemes can be used by attackers for a variety of things. Here at NAU, attacks designed to gather user ids and passwords of accounts have been successfully used to take over email accounts and use them to send spam. Having an account stolen as a result of a successful phishing attack is very disruptive to the campus, as it usually results in all campus email being blocked by major email providers such as Hotmail and Yahoo. It’s particularly disruptive to the owner of the compromised account, as ITS must disable their access to prevent continued abuse of the account and investigate the extent of the break-in. In order to help minimize the impact of phishing attacks, it’s important for everyone to promptly and properly report them to the appropriate authorities.

The first step is to identify the appropriate authority.

• If the message is spoofing an NAU department, report it to the NAU Solution Center or Student Technology Services Help Desk.
• If the attack is spoofing an entity other than NAU, the attack should be reported to that agency.

The second step is to gather the appropriate information to be reported. Whether you are reporting a phishing attack to NAU or another agency, the person receiving the report will need the original message you received and the normally hidden email headers.

Bring up OWA in Internet Explorer so that you get the full OWA version. Double-click on the message in the inbox so the message opens in its own window. At the top of the window will be several icons. One of them is the Message Details icon. It is a picture of an open envelope with a sheet of paper superimposed over the right side of the envelope. It’s just to the left of the Printer icon. Click the Message Details icon, and a new window will open. At the bottom of the window will be a text box containing the headers. Select, copy, and paste the headers into the email with the forwarded phish message.

The final step is to forward the original email and the header information to the appropriate agency.

• Report phishing attacks spoofing NAU by reporting it to the ITS Solution Center  at ask-its@nau.edu, or to the Student Technology Center at StudentComputing@nau.edu.
• If the attack is spoofing a company other than NAU, a commonly available email address for this is the Abuse address. Many companies on the Internet have an Abuse account for reports of misbehavior like phishing attempts. To send email to this account, you must first identify the company’s Internet name. This should be the same as the name of their main web site, without the “www” prefix. For example, the Arizona State Credit Union’s web site is www.azstcu.org. Their abuse account is abuse@azstcu.org.