Thousands of teachers and students at Portland State University (PSU) received phishing emails recently. The email messages were designed to appear as if they had been sent by the university’s IT and User Support Services departments. The content of the email messages differed. However, they all requested users to disclose their passwords and usernames to the sender.

Spammers often generate this type of attack which is called “spear phishing.” The email accounts of many campus students in Oregon have been threatened by these spam attacks. Phishing involves scammers sending out bulk email messages that appear to be sent from trusted organizations such as financial institutions to convince users to respond. By pretending to be a trusted representative of the organization, the scammers are often able to establish trust of recipients.

The Associate CIO of Technology Services at PSU, Janaka Jayawardena, reported that the scammers got personal in this latest attack. The spear phishers decided to impersonate Jayawardena in the spam email messages. Although most recipients chose to report or ignore the emails, some users responded. Unfortunately, scammers were then able to compromise their email account and sent out mass emails using those accounts.

Jayawardena expresses concern that these spear phishers may target the PSU’s Student Information System, BanWeb. If these accounts are compromised, spammers could access students’ confidential information such as financial aid details, school schedules and contact details.

Email hosting firms such as Yahoo! and Hotmail began to notice a flood of spam email messages from pdx.edu accounts. They ended up blacklisting incoming emails from all Portland State users.

IT officials at the university believe these latest attacks were instigated by multiple groups, rather than just one. However, they have not identified who is responsible. Some of the ISPs have been traced to phishers in Nigeria and India, although many attackers used an ISP anonymizer program called Tor which disables any attempts at tracking.

March 2008 revealed a surprising increase in the volume of worldwide spam. An average of 81% of all the email traffic consisted of spam messages, with an astonishing peak of 88%. To give you a better idea of the increase, one of the leading security software providers, Symantec produced a report entitled the “State of Spam.”

The report revealed that only 65% of all email was unsolicited messages for the first half of 2007 which rose to 70% during the second half of the year. The company also confirmed that approximately 23% of spam messages are sent from the United States, followed by Russia with approximately 6%.

Apparently, the 2010 Soccer World Cup has already generated 419 scam email messages. Although spammers normally entice unsuspecting victims with unclaimed property, they have focused their attention on the 2010 South African World Cup as a new strategy.

April 2008 saw another new trend in the world of spam – capitalizing on the US tax year. Certain spammers are sending messages that claim to be sent by Internal Revenue Service (IRS) representatives. One of these messages advised taxpayers that they are entitled to a tax refund if they provide their payment details on a site that clearly does not belong to the IRS. Another group of spammers has utilized social engineering to dupe users into downloading malware on to their computers.

Symantec’s report includes the innovative use of TurboTax which is a popular American tax software program. Spammers send emails to users recommending they load updates to their software so they can comply with alleged new requirements established by the IRS.

If users view the details in the From field, they will notice a “cn” domain which should alert them that the message is not being sent from the IRS. The URL which is turbotax.com/update also does not come from the official TurboTax website; users are directed to an empty page with a popup requesting them to download a particular file.

Symantec advised all users to rely on common sense when they receive suspicious email messages. Another tip is to ensure their email security programs are completely up to date so they can protect your computer against new online threats that continue to emerge.