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.

Given the huge increase in spam, it’s very important to manage your email messages so you can protect your files, confidential information and computer from ruthless hackers. Purchasing an effective anti-spam product is a great place to start.

There are so many choices when it comes to software programs that it can be difficult to decide. We have reviewed 2 recent anti-spam products that are based on the innovative concept of community-based filtering. Both of these software programs have proven to be very effective in the continuous fight against spam and are worth considering.

Cloudmark Desktop 5.3.3 For Microsoft Outlook

Cloudmark started the innovative concept of community-based spam filtering which now includes more than 1 million participants. Community members can mark messages as spam at which point Cloudmark will assigns a unique fingerprint to the content and send the fingerprint to a central database.

Once the database receives a sufficient number of reports for the exact same message, the message will be marked as spam and will be blocked for all other members. Potential spammers are thwarted by the trust rating system used by the company; if the community does not agree with your spam assessment, your trust rating will decrease and vice-versa.

This program will keep the majority of spam from flooding your inbox and different versions exist to support Thunderbird and Outlook Express. The company is currently working on a version for
Vista’s Windows Mail. You can add specific addresses or domains to a whitelist and automatically add anyone in your current list of contacts.

Pros: Given its strong community-based filtering system, Cloudmark Desktop is very effective at blocking spam. The program almost never blocks valid email messages. Will handle webmail-via-POP3, Exchange, IMAP and POP3 accounts.

Cons: Does not currently support Windows Mail or web-based accounts that don’t provide POP3 access. Very similar to iHateSpam 5.0, but twice the price.

iHateSpam 5.0

Sunbelt Software has created effective anti-spam software that relies on the same spam-fighting community as Cloudmark Desktop. Although it’s currently only available for Outlook, plans are to include versions compatible with Outlook Express, Vista’s Windows Mail and Thunderbird in the near future. From the new iHateSpam toolbar, you can check a box to automatically whitelist anyone on your contacts list. You can also manually add any domains or sends to the list.

iHateSpam can also effectively distinguish between bulk mail such as newsletters and unsolicited messages. In fact, recent tests indicate a very impressive false positive rate of approximately one tenth of one percent.

Pros: Community-based spam filtering manages to catch most spam messages without blocking virtually any valid mail. It will filter POP3, IMAP, Exchange or webmail-via-POP3 accounts and costs half of Cloudmark Desktop.

Cons: No support for Windows Mail, Outlook Express, Thunderbird, web-based email or other email clients.

These are just two of the more innovative anti-spam programs currently available. Conduct some research to find one that works best for you and make sure you install it as soon as possible. Community-based anti-spam products such as these will help you join the millions of users worldwide who are determined to fight spam.