KAUST Awareness Program – September Phishing Campaign: Souq gift voucher
This week, the Information Security team ran a phishing campaign to raise awareness about the dangers of phishing.
Phishing is defined as the attempt to acquire sensitive information such as usernames, passwords, and credit card details (and sometimes, indirectly, money) by masquerading as a trustworthy entity in an electronic communication.
Communications purporting to be from popular social web sites, auction sites, banks, government entities, online payment processors or IT administrators are commonly used to lure unsuspecting public.
The Information Security Awareness campaigns are an ongoing effort to increase and improve the online security and safety of KAUST employees, as per the Human Firewall Procedure. The following information might have alerted you that it was a phishing attempt: the email was sent from outside KAUST, specifically from souq@amazingcoupons.co.uk, which is not a KAUST-owned website nor the authentic Souq website.
This campaign is a good reminder for us all in the KAUST community to not be as forthcoming in clicking on links that come from external email addresses. In the latest campaign an email was sent out to 3,938 community members, of those only 290 opened the attachment. See the graph below:
We would like to congratulate the following individuals, who were the fastest reporters for this phishing campaign:
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Marcos B. Seneca Jr. , 4 seconds *NEW RECORD*
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Abdullah Ahmed Al-Aseeri, 2 minutes 1 second
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Olive Sylvia Camilleri, 3 minutes 31 seconds
If you have any questions, please contact us at: askinfosec@kaust.edu.sa.
Good luck!
