Hackers phishing for UCLA accounts

Recent increases in “phishing” attempts have caught the attention of UCLA officials, prompting mass e-mails from Bruin OnLine and the Office of Information Technology to warn students and staff about the dangers of such scams.

Attempts to acquire personal information through e-mails that are disguised as official and trustworthy fall under the term “phishing.”

“This has really gotten out of control,” said Ross Bollens, UCLA director of IT security.

Bollens said UCLA is currently a target of “spear phishing,” in which an entire institute is specifically attacked by phishers.

The first attempt occurred around winter break, and attacks have continued to increase every month.

“They know it’s working because they know people are responding. So we just keep getting hit,” said Eugene Acosta, Bruin OnLine manager.

The scams are generally financially motivated, and such e-mails usually ask for sensitive personal information ranging from Social Security numbers to Bruin OnLine passwords.

Acosta said that originally the warning e-mail from Bruin OnLine contained a link to a site where students could change their passwords if they had been a victim of phishing.

However, both Bollens and Acosta decided the warning e-mail would itself seem like a phishing attempt because phishers often put links to “malware” sites that can infect computers. Malware, short for “malicious software,” can then turn infected computers into “bots,” which phishers use to continue their attempts on others.

If a phisher gets a hold of a UCLA student’s or staff member’s login information, he can compromise that individual’s credentials and use the e-mail address to attack others. Bollens brought up a situation in which the California Institute of Technology traced back a phishing attempt to a UCLA account that had been taken over.

Once someone’s account has been compromised, Bruin OnLine will remove that person’s e-mail services and wait to be contacted by the individual. The person affected will then be instructed to create a new password to prevent future login by scammers.

One recent phishing attempt, disguised as an e-mail from Bruin OnLine, asked students to reply with their login information to avoid having their e-mail accounts deleted. Acosta said that UCLA does not delete accounts until a student has graduated or left the school. Graduates also have lifetime e-mail forwarding.

The difficulty of preventing phishing e-mails from reaching their intended targets comes from the fact that phishers frequently change both the e-mail addresses and formats they use.

“Technologically there’s nothing we can do. They’re coming from everywhere, masquerading as everything,” Bollens said.

Luke Yu, a first-year psychobiology student, said he receives phishing e-mails often enough for them to be a nuisance, but he can usually tell they are scams.

“They can offer a large chunk of money that’s supposedly free, and they ask you to reply with your name and contact information. Sometimes I’ll actually consider it, but in the end it’s still ridiculous,” Yu said.

Though most scams are obvious, Bollens added that phishers are getting more sophisticated and that a couple attempts of “whaling” ““ where a phisher targets those with higher credentials in order to seem more official when attacking others ““ had already surfaced at UCLA.

Both Acosta and Bollens said that the likeliness of successful phishing would decrease with the number of people who become aware of its presence and actively avoid any suspicious e-mails.

“Education is probably the best way to combat phishers,” Bollens said.