Computer hacking is an activity as old as computers themselves.

Some people feel the need to exploit any technology for personal gain, even if it comes at the expense of innocent users.

Email phishing is a fairly common form of hacking, and anyone with a wichita.edu email account has likely received several email warnings about phishing attempts from campus security this semester. Most probably disregard the emails and delete them, but heeding those warnings could be the key to saving the university a great deal of trouble.

Put simply, phishing is an attempt by a hacker to coerce the recipient of the email into filling out personal information. That can mean anything from user identification on websites to credit card numbers. James Holmes, WSU’s director of server infrastructure, said a common phishing tactic is fear.

“Frequently, what a phishing email will do is try to scare you into filling out the information,” Holmes said.

The hackers use urgent language to persuade their victims to give up personal information. The idea is to scare the user into thinking they will be locked out of their account if they do not immediately give up their password to a hacker who is posing as technical support.

“The common theme in a lot of these is the urgency,” Holmes said. “That’s generally a pretty good indication, when you see that type of urgent language, that it’s probably something fishy.”

If a hacker does somehow obtain account information, the results can be inconvenient at best and disastrous at the worst. At that point, they would use a WSU email account to send out even more spam and entice more people into it.

If it is not caught and shut down quickly, it could create a snowball effect that would make life difficult for anyone at WSU. If the university’s email server is caught sending out spam, it could be blacklisted and forbidden from sending any emails for days at a time. However, this can be avoided entirely if people follow a few simple steps.

“I always like to encourage people to look at the location bar and really be suspicious of anything that doesn’t say wichita.edu,” Holmes said.

While some phishing attempts are unsophisticated and can be easily diagnosed, others are far more devious. Sometimes, they even mirror the look of official WSU login screens. However, if it is not a wichita.edu address, it should be disregarded immediately.

“Anything that asks for personal information should be heavily scrutinized, because nobody at Wichita State should be doing that,” Holmes said.

If anyone is unsure whether an email is valid or not, the best course of action is to forward the email to [email protected]. An expert will look at the email and diagnose its validity. Holmes said the technical staff on campus will do whatever it can to help people with less computer sophistication.

“There’s a broad range of technical expertise on the campus, and some people are very easily fooled,” Holmes said. “We try to protect that lowest common denominator.”