Re: EDUCAUSE Statement on Server Breach

[Benjamin Parker <parkerbc () MOUNTUNION EDU>]

I have been thinking this is very well what might have happened in the
Oxford/Google Apps discussion. I know our institution would do the same
thing, where a VP or Dean says we are going to message students and have
them click on links despite protests. Then bad stuff happens and you have
to over react the other way because of the political mess rolling downhill.


On Tue, Feb 19, 2013 at 3:04 PM, Michael Sinatra <
michael () rancid berkeley edu> wrote:

> On 2/19/13 11:50 AM, Kevin Halgren wrote:
> > It's worth noting that this e-mail was literally impossible to
> > differentiate from a phishing e-mail as sent via the e-mail marketer, to
> > my eyes it looked more like phishing than not.  Confirmation via
> > alternate channels was required to confirm its authenticity.
>
> <rant>
> This should be a lesson to all of us, since EDUCAUSE is definitely not
> alone here: We all do regular, legitimate business in ways that is
> sometimes indistinguishable from phishing, at least to regular users.
> That needs to stop.  Email marketers and analytics junkies will not like
> to hear this, but we need to put an end to embedded email links that are
> redirected through other systems.  IMO, we should put an end to *all*
> legitimate links in emails; instead have a business portal with all of
> the links to surveys, training sites, etc., and have notification emails
> for when new things appear on the portal.  In addition, we could modify
> our SSO sites so that they alert users when they need to take care of
> something that we would normally use email for which to notify the user.
>  Once that's done, we can assure users that we will NEVER ask them to
> click on a link in an email, just like we currently remind them that we
> never ask them for passwords.
>
> If that is "too hard" and/or the analytics stuff is "too valuable" then
> we need to simply accept the risk that our users will get caught in
> phishing attacks.  The bad guys have figured out that it is very easy to
> mimic our business practices, and they have gotten very good at doing
> it.  Unless we change those practices, they will find us to be easy
> pickings.
> </rant>
>
> Again, if this sounds like picking on EDUCAUSE, it's not.  We, as a
> community, all do these things.  We need to change our own conventional
> wisdom.
>
> michael


-- 
Ben Parker
Senior Network Engineer
University of Mount Union
Phone: 330-829-2866
Twitter: @BenParker82