A phishing attack on Ball State e-mail accounts tricked some users, and the school's computer security department has been helping clear up machines compromised in the attack, a Ball State official said Thursday.
University Computing Services sent an e-mail to all campus accounts alerting students, faculty and staff about a malicious message posing as a security directive to e-mail account holders. Phishing is the term used to describe an attempt to obtain passwords or other personal information from e-mail users, often by getting them to click on a link that installs "malware," or malicious software. In some attacks, the victim's computer is subverted to become part of a network that sends blasts of emails without users' knowledge.
The bogus e-mail sent to Ball State users claims to be from the school's "Webmail Administrator" and urges the user to click on a link.
Computing Services started seeing a large amount of spam being sent Tuesday night, said Deb Howell, senior systems security communications manager.
"We saw that the [infected] computer was sending lots and lots of emails, and we started working to prevent it," she said.
The malware installed when a victim clicks on a link in the bogus e-mail compromises the user's computer if the person does not have an updated antivirus program, Howell said. The malware includes a key-logging feature that captures passwords and other information as it is entered by the user.
"A key-logger is a type of malicious software. Once it is installed on a computer it records keystrokes. It does this by monitoring a user's input and keeping a log of all keys that are pressed," Howell said. "Individuals infected are meeting with me today so we can clean the computers, and the university is making sure all systems on campus are clean."
A warning e-mail sent by Howell's office said people who receive the bogus message or other suspicious email should not respond or click on the link. The alert explained that university symbols used in the email to make it appear genuine were used illegally.
Howell said Ball State has had similar cases before, in which users were asked to provide their username and password, but UCS had not seen this kind of attack before.
"Until now hackers have not been able to mimic Ball State content as well as they have done on this phishing attempt," she said. "They have successfully tricked some individuals into clicking links or providing confidential information."
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