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Sophisticated hackers target CMU faculty

PITTSBURGH — Employees at Pittsburgh’s Carnegie Mellon University were recently the target of a sophisticated hacking attempt.

On Saturday, about 200 faculty and staff at CMU received an e-mail claiming to contain information about a raise.

The real content of the e-mail, however, was found to be a phishing scheme.

The hackers made it difficult for the faculty and staff to tell they were under attack by replicating the CMU log-in site, which could make the victim believe that they were logging in to the actual university site.

CMU took action immediately, informing everyone within the university of the attempt to compromise personal information.

“I got an email saying ‘Hey, be careful about this. There was a phishing scheme going around,’” said CMU student Ramsey Natour.

According to an e-mail sent to the campus community, only a few people that received the e-mail clicked on the link.

Since then, the university has secured those accounts.

“I guess I feel that anybody could fall for it, but they handled it pretty well,” said Natour.

To help prevent future incidents, the Information Security Office at CMU sent out safeguard reminders to staff and students.

Reminders included verifying the authenticity of an e-mail before opening, checking URLs before logging in to a site and reporting concerns as soon as they arise.

Carnegie Mellon also provides an online training program that teaches participants how to spot phishing e-mails.

WPXI

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