Starting mid-day Tuesday, March 12th you will start seeing the following text, highlighted in yellow, at the top of email messages you receive that come from senders outside of the Ithaca College email system:
"This message originated from outside the Ithaca College email system."
Over the past few months we and our colleagues at other institutions have seen an increase in targeted email phishing attacks from external email addresses. The attackers impersonate College employees by registering with their names or titles for email accounts on Gmail or other services. Since some email clients display only the sender name and not their email address, it’s easy to be tricked into thinking the message was sent by someone you know.
Flagging external email messages is gaining adoption as an anti-phishing measure at other schools and businesses. IC is trying it out for the remainder of this semester to assess its effectiveness. The inclusion of this warning text does not mean that a message is fraudulent, just that you should exercise caution knowing we cannot verify the identity of external senders. Please be extra cautious if an external sender claims to be a member of the Ithaca College community. To help our students, faculty, staff, and other members of the IC community detect phishing attacks, please use your Ithaca College email account for all academic and professional Ithaca College communication.
Please contact the IT Service Desk with any issues you discover or with general feedback. In particular, please let us know if messages from services that send messages on behalf of IC are being flagged with the warning text. We have made exceptions for those we know about, and will add others as we learn of them. Thanks for your continued support.
Information Technology Service Desk
104 Job Hall
servicedesk@ithaca.edu
607-274-1000
https://www.ithaca.edu/intercom/article.php/20190307141913477