What you should know about phishing  [08.07.20]

Occasionally, e-mails are delivered that have a criminal background. In these e-mails you will be informed that your user account is subject to a restriction, e.g. too little storage space. If you do not react, the user account should be blocked. The e-mails often contain links to a website where you can request activation by entering your access data. Even though a certain amount of time pressure is more or less required to process many e-mails in the meantime, it is absolutely necessary to be careful at this point.

Sometimes the websites you are directed to are kept simple, but sometimes they look like websites you know. The latter may then seem trustworthy to you, but at this point it is only a matter of getting your access data. This is called phishing ("Password Fishing"). If you enter your access data here, e.g. e-mails are immediately sent in your name and via the university's e-mail server. This is not only annoying for you and the recipients, but may also affect all other Hohenheim users. Sending such spam e-mails reduces the so-called reputation of the university's central e-mail server and thus also the possibility of delivering e-mails. A delayed delivery of the otherwise fast e-mail dispatch is therefore inevitable.

Links in e-mails are tricky. Without clicking on them, the target can be displayed by simply dragging the mouse over them. The target should be known to you. In the case of the University of Hohenheim, uni-hohenheim.de should also appear in the right place and spelling:

It goes without saying that access data should only be entered via secure websites. You can recognize this by the address beginning with https and the display by the browser (green lock) in the address line. Unfortunately, a secure website is no guarantee that it is not also a phishing site.

If you have any questions, please contact kim-it@uni-hohenheim.de.


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