Spotting dodgy emails – be in the know in just 15 minutes
21 Jun 2016
Take the University’s new online phishing awareness course and learn how to spot the difference between fact and fake, in less than 15mins.
It’s incredibly easy to get caught out by a well-crafted phishing campaign as many of you will know from the recent malicious email about staff recognition awards. The University is offering a short online course to help you spot emails of this type referred to as ‘phishing’.
A phishing attempt is an email that tries to trick the recipient into giving out passwords, bank account details or other personal information, or into going to websites made to look exactly like the University web page.
While some of these emails are easy to identify, many are difficult to recognise because they appear authentic down to the last detail.
Being tricked by one of these emails doesn’t just make your own personal information vulnerable. It puts the entire University at risk because of the potential for scammers to gain access to systems inside the University’s firewall. This may compromise other peoples personal information stored on our systems – a colleague’s bank details, sensitive student information or valuable research data.
Even if you think you have nothing of importance on your computer, you make the University’s entire network more vulnerable when you click on a link in a phishing email.
All of us – staff and students – need to be vigilant of these attacks and take steps to ensure they do not succeed. Completing the course takes less than 15 minutes and could mean the difference between losing your valuable personal information or protecting it and the University.
To make it as easy as possible all colleagues have been pre-enrolled onto the course in Blackboard.
If you experience problems with accessing any part of the content due to a disability or impairment and need the course in a different format please email the IT Services training team:
Take the phishing awareness course online by logging into Blackboard. Please use Chrome or Firefox for the best experience.
Other information
Have you seen our comedy mini-series "Restricted Intelligence" which focuses on the importance of cyber security in the workplace?
One of the most recent episodes covers the topic of phishing:
IT Services