Chief information officer of information technology Trevor Seifert spoke at the SGA meeting Feb. 17 about how to spot phishing attempts. 

Seifert said if anyone spots phishing in their email or is unsure if an email is a phishing attempt to forward the emails to the IT help desk.

“Every time we’ve seen a cub account gets compromised, it’s literally just to try and get credentials to then send out other emails,” Seifert said.

Over the last six years, UCA IT initiated five planned fishing attempts, and 12.3% of all faculty and staff are clicking on the links, with 42.8% of the 12.3% giving up their credentials.

“We don’t publish job postings in email, and we will not hire you via email,” Seifert said regarding phishing emails that propose job offerings. “There is no university job that will hire you via email. You have to apply via people admin. You might get a notification that we’ve got a job opening or something like that, but we’re going to redirect you to the actual job posting and admin.”

AI has been used in phishing emails to eliminate grammatical errors to make the emails appear more credible. Seifert emphasized the importance of making sure emails being received are from a valid email address. 

Seifert said phishers have also been using the Duo Mobile app to reel people in.

“We’re never going to ask you to give us your passcode for Duo,” said Seifert.

Seifert also mentioned that a lot of UCA’s freshman students come from high schools that used closed email networks in which they could only receive valid emails, so they haven’t had to face phishing emails before and not know that they shouldn’t be replying to them. 

“Please don’t use the same password here that you use for Snapchat, TikTok, Instagram, things like that,” said Seifert. “The only thing that we can come to the conclusion that they’re really doing is harvesting user IDs and passwords, but then they go out on the dark web and try and figure out where else those accounts might be used to try and get into something that could be more beneficial to them. So I do ask that whatever you use for your user ID and password here at the university isn’t used across multiple platforms.”

Following Seifert’s presentation, senator Abby Simpson was named as senator of the month by Gabby Stokes, vice president of operations, for having a “strong and knowledgeable presence on anything,” “not being afraid to talk to her peers” and “being a great advocate.”