New trends in phishing and scams

GCSU Information Security would like to make you aware of a few new trends in phishing and scams that we’re seeing frequently on campus.

Many GCSU employees are receiving texts on their personal cell phones that state that they’re from either the president, the provost or one of the deans at GCSU. Please look carefully at these before responding.  The numbers are never local, and for most of us, it’s highly unlikely that we’d receive a text from this person.

This is just one of the many scams directed to your personal cell phone so that the scammer can bypass all of our security layers and practices on campus.

Another new trend is for scammers to send QR codes that you’ll use on your phone to do something; again bypassing all of our security layers and practices.  Look carefully at the sender.  Lately, many of these are coming in from Japan and purport to be from Microsoft, Apple or GCSU.

When in doubt, if it’s email, please route it through Phish Alert.  If you can’t, please forward the potential threat to iso@gcsu.edu and we’ll look at it as soon as we can.