Worldwide Increase in Spam Attacks May Cause Delays in Forwarding Messages to Outside Email Providers
Tuesday, June 30, 2009
The University's Email Spam and Virus service provider has notified CSSD that a worldwide increase in spam messages over the past 48 hours may result in delivery delays for users who forward mail to outside email providers such as Gmail, Comcast, AOL, and others. During this time, there has been a spike in spam attacks including Canadian phamaceutical messages, newsletter spoofs, false Microsoft Outlook update alerts, and other types of messages. These spikes have resulted in delays of up to 30 minutes for messages forwarded to outside accounts.
In addition, the spam and virus filtering provider has advised the University that while 99% of these messages are successfully removed from mail delivered to University email accounts, there is a possibility that users may receive one or more of these messages. CSSD recommends that users delete any suspicious email messages immediately without clicking on any links that the messages contain. Please contact the Technology Help Desk at 412-624-HELP [4357] for additional information or assistance, if needed.