"Attempted Theft of Personal Information," read the subject line of an e-mail from Morris Altman, Internet security officer and director of network infrastructure at Queens College, which appeared in students' QC e-mail inboxes on Nov. 20.
That message was sent because phishing e-mails breached QC's Internet security and made their way to inboxes.
"There have been numerous instances of this sort of activity targeting members of the QC community," said Altman in the e-mail.
By falsely representing CUNY, QC or other organizations, spammers can con students or faculty into providing them with confidential information, which could allow the spammers to steal their identities.
Phishing e-mails also ask users to repeatedly type in their e-mail account passwords. Although the hackers may not get vital information through these phishing e-mails, they could overtake the accounts and use them to continue spamming others without the owners' knowledge.
"I'm surprised a virus got into the system," said Emmanuel Dutan, junior. Dutan said it was good that the Office of Converging Technologies kept students and faculty informed with notices and e-mails. "Students should be more careful.
Four days later, on Nov. 24, another alert was sent by the school, warning students and faculty about spammers trying to send them viruses or retrieve their personal information under the disguise of holiday e-cards. If opened, the greetings could infect the computers of both the sender and recipient.
In one case Altman has dealt with, the OCT was able to trace the spammers' e-mails back to the same return address. The OCT blocked that address from sending e-mails to any QC e-mail accounts.
Altman would not disclose the number of QC e-mail accounts that were affected, but said that, in the past week, there have not been any cases of accounts being breached.
QC usually sends out alerts as breaches are reported by the CUNY Cyber Security Office, which gets warnings from the state.
"It's helpful," said Pankil Desai, senior, who appreciated the fact that the school attempted to warn students.
Mehak Javed, senior, said he found the e-mails "not really that informative." He said that, compared to the phishing alerts, the alert about the holiday e-cards did not provide much information and wasn't very effective.
Some students interviewed admitted to not checking their QC e-mail accounts on a regular basis. Others said they did not receive the e-mails at all.
"I really hope that [security breach] doesn't happen to my [QC e-mail account]," said Anjanie Sudhai, sophomore. "You would think QC accounts were safe."
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