News Articles
Email ‘Governor’ Aims to
Overrule Spammers
Compromised email accounts damage U of G’s Internet reputation
U of G continues to experience compromised email accounts because of phishing attacks, says chief information officer Mike Ridley.
“Tens or even hundreds of thousands of outgoing spam email messages can be generated by a compromised account before we’re able to lock it,” he says. “This has resulted in other email systems such as Hotmail refusing to receive any email originating from the uoguelph.ca domain — a situation that limits our ability to communicate with many people associated with the University.”
The IT security group of the CIO recommended that Computing and Communications Services (CCS) develop a “throttling” or “governor” in Guelph’s email system to limit the number of messages an account can generate, says Ridley.
“This spam control utility has now been implemented after thorough testing. It will restrict spammers’ ability to steal our computing resources and will prevent damage to our Internet reputation. University accounts generating excessive email will be blocked from further sending until the issue is resolved.”
The limit has initially been set at 10,000 outgoing messages in a 24-hour period and will be evaluated as CCS gains more experience with the tool, he says.
“Care has also been taken to profile legitimate email use, so no adverse effects are expected. In addition, accounts and users with exceptional requirements can be easily accommodated.”
Ridley reminds the U of G community that CCS never requests that user names and passwords be sent through email. In addition, users should be careful when following http links in unsolicited emails.
He notes that of the eight million emails that arrive at U of G each day, 97 per cent of them are spam that is blocked by CCS.