Students may recognize Eric McCloy, Eastern’s Chief Information Officer (CIO), by name from his infamous campus-wide emails warning students about the newest scam emails going around.
While his messages are sprinkled with gifs and friendly reminders, the issues about which he is contacting students are less than lighthearted. His emails typically identify scams and hackers before students fall for them.
Commonly identified topics of warning in his emails are suspicious emails to Eastern students requesting personal login information. For instance, an Eastern email address posing as an official campus office informing a student about an issue with an account. The email will ask for passwords to “fix” whatever issue they allege has occurred.
“One of the things that I’m highly opinionated about is the fact that there’s a piece of cyber security that, no matter how good my technology is, I can’t fix,” McCloy said. This piece is the fact that Eastern students and faculty alike will willingly give away their login information and fall for these scams with no second thought.
McCloy shared that this has been a recurring issue for as long as he can remember and continues today, saying that he is currently working on restoring accounts for “60 students who gave away their account information.”
There are “a couple of very easy tells” that are dead giveaways that an email is from a scammer. McCloy says that the number one tell is that an email address and name do not match each other. “So, for example, if the name says Registrar’s Office, and the email address says Jack Smith, that it’s a scam. Every time,” he said, “That’s the one I want everybody to learn, just so badly it hurts.”
He also warns that giving away one’s own password does not effect their account alone. “If you can get in on one person’s account, you can move to a bunch of other ones,” McCloy said. One student carelessly giving away information can potentially put the information and accounts of other students at risk as well.
Once an Eastern email is detected to be hacked by an outside source, it is immediately shut down by the institution. Obviously, in this case, the Office of the CIO cannot then email the account owner to make them aware of the situation. They will simply open their computer and be unable to log into their google account.
McCloy’s instructions to these students is to not mess with anything themselves and call the help desk as soon as possible. From there, they can work with the student to restore their account and get them back on track.
The moral of the story is simple: trust no one in your inbox with your personal information, always double check the sender’s name and email address on suspicious-looking messages and get in contact with the help desk if anything should go awry. McCloy believes this is a matter of using one’s common sense and critical thinking skills to prevent such incidents.
“By the way, I have a lot of opinions about critical thinking, too,” McCloy said.
