Recently, a number of email messages that appear to have been sent by an individual or office familiar to the recipient – a colleague, student, teacher or the university administration – have started circulating in the Bilkent community.
These are in fact phishing schemes that are attempting to steal your personal information by using the display name of a Bilkent sender in combination with a non-Bilkent email address.
Here’s how it works: if a fraudster wants to make an email appear to have come from John Doe, whose real email address is jdoe@bilkent.edu.tr, the sender line may look something like this:
From: John Doe <ausername@somedomain.com>
This fraudulent email, once delivered, appears legitimate because most user inboxes show only the display name (i.e., the full name of the sender).
Don’t trust the display names; check the email address in the header, which is enclosed in < > characters.
The “From” header in a genuine email from a Bilkent account would look like this:
From: John Doe <jdoe@bilkent.edu.tr>
Please
-Do not send a user ID or password in an email.
-Do not respond to emails threatening to close your account if you do not confirm certain credentials.
-Do not click links in suspicious email messages.
If you have responded to a phishing scheme by submitting information about your account or password, you should change your password immediately.