USC E-Mail Accounts Hit With Phishing Spam

We've all seen phishing e-mails before (thank you eBay, PayPal) but it's a bit trickier when the e-mail deliberately asking you to pony up your e-mail username and password comes from a sender purporting to be USCTEAM.

The e-mail received today by several USC e-mail account holders suggests that the user's e-mail account will be terminated "permanently" within 7 days lest the recipient respond with account details including username, password, date of birth, and "country or territory."

Whenever an e-mail appears in our inbox asking for such specifics, the first thing we do is check the details at top. Who is the sender? In this case it is "uscteam50@bellsouth.net" with the even more suspicious reply-to address "accountupgrades02@live.com".

Thus the conclusion that this is a phishing e-mail -- spam that is directed especially to attain personal information necessary to hack into one's account.

USC's Information Technology Services confirmed the nature of this spoof e-mail earlier today and recommends:

If you have responded to the spam and submitted information about your USC password, you should immediately go to www.usc.edu/its/password to change your USC password.