Student e-mails are still under fire from spammers, causing e-mail accounts to become disabled and putting student messages at risk of being considered spam itself.
Loren Malm, assistant director of security, policy, systems and assessment, said spammers infiltrated about 12 student e-mail accounts and Ball State University e-mail accounts had been disabled three times this semester. Two have been within a week.
Malm said students were not able to send e-mails between 6:30 p.m. and 10:30 p.m. Tuesday, but they still could receive messages during that time.
A new spam message was circulating in Ball State University accounts Wednesday, but University Computing Services had a sample of the message sent.
UCS used an exact text search of the message in accounts and deleted the message so students do not have a chance to give away their password, he said.
No student has an infiltrated e-mail account as of Wednesday, he said.
Malm said spammers operated three or four students' e-mail and the Microsoft service that the university uses to send e-mails disabled all accounts.
Spammers infiltrate e-mail accounts by posing as UCS and ask for a student's user name and password, he said. Once spammers have access to the account, they can use the account as a way to send spam through spam filters, he said.
UCS stopped the infiltrated accounts from sending e-mails and changed the student passwords to stop them from being used in the future, he said.
The students have to call UCS to change their password again to regain access to their accounts, he said.
He said Microsoft disabled accounts so the e-mail service was not considered a spammer by other filtering services. Infiltrated accounts can send two million messages a day, he said.
"Even in a few minutes, they can send out quite a few messages," he said.
If the server was blacklisted, all e-mails sent from Ball State accounts would be considered spam and would be deleted from people's mailboxes automatically, he said.
"We really have to catch them pretty quickly before it becomes a problem," he said.
Sarah LaChat, coordinator of technology documentation and support services, said UCS would never ask for the account password and user name.
"The biggest chance of beating this is people not giving out their personal information," she said.
Web siteTo change your Ball State account password go to bsu.edu/password
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