It’s been in the news.  This Wednesday - April Fools' Day - computers that are infected by a virus called the Confickr worm will be used to send out e–mail scams/spam, viruses, or may even be used to steal information from the affected computer.

Dear Members of the Franklin & Marshall Community,

I wanted to let you know that, beginning at 5PM this Friday evening (March 7, 2009), one of our on-line tools, myDiplomat, will be unavailable for use until late on Saturday afternoon (March 8, 2009). myDiplomat is used to view budget statements and academic records by our students, faculty and professional staff. All other on-line resources and systems such as webmail, email, BlackBoard, eDisk, library resources, software server, password changes and directory information in F&M People Info will be available for use during this downtime. An email will be sent once the system is back on-line and available for use.

Why are we doing this and why now?

As we look forward to Spring, Internet con-artists are hard at work crafting schemes, called phishing attacks, to steal your identity. A recent trend is an increase in these phishing attacks on weekends when Information Technology Services staff and email system administrators are home for the weekend. If you read no further, please remember to NEVER provide your username and password to ANYONE in a reply to an email message: doing so ALWAYS ends badly, for you and for F&M. Your account is compromised and email from F&M is blocked because you caused a SPAM stream to start.

Several members of the Franklin & Marshall community have reported to Information Technology Services that they received notices indicating problems with their accounts.  These messages are accompanied by a request to confirm Email Username, Email Password, and Date of Birth.  These email requests appear to come from "webmaster-at-fandm.edu" or the "Fandm.edu Mail Upgrade Team."

These messages are known as phishing scams and are designed to steal your account information.

Please disregard these messages.  Neither Information Technology Services nor any other legitimate organization would use messages of this type to communicate with users.