From German words to mortgage offers, the spam Northwestern Webmail users receive daily might soon be eliminated.
Information Technology officials told The Daily on Monday they plan to implement a new e-mail defense system for Webmail. The server-level virus filter will be implemented Wednesday, while junk mail filter will go into effect in October, said Wendy Woodward, NUIT’s director.
This announcement came after many students received more junk mail than usual over the weekend. Most of the extra spam was probably due to a trojan horse, a virus that is a variation on the Sober worm some students received last week, Woodward said.
The trojan sends spam e-mail to addresses from the occupied computer with subjects in English or German.
“Hopefully we won’t be seeing these anymore (viruses),” Woodward said. “The new filter will eliminate the viruses at the system level before they get to students’ inboxes.”
While the virus filter will stop e-mails with harmful attachments from entering students’ mailboxes, a spam filter will put junk mail into a different folder, Woodward said. Similar to the junk mailboxes found on servers such as Yahoo and Hotmail, the quarantined box will keep unwanted mail out of the user’s inbox.
“You’ll get a message each day listing the e-mails in the junk folder,” Woodward said of the plan. “You can either ignore it or access the quarantined mail.”
The trojan horse that hit NU’s e-mail hit inboxes around the world, Woodward said. “I had 300 e-mails in my inbox Monday, and I usually have about 100,” Woodward said.
Although many students have received more spam than usual, Woodward said NUIT filtered the system Monday morning, cutting down on the amount of junk mail.
“It’s a rather minor problem,” Woodward said. “Most people don’t click on attachments from those they don’t know.”
Spam can come in many forms. One Communications Residential College resident reported a fake e-mail request from a bank asking for information, said David Spett, a residential networking consultant, Medill freshman and former Daily staffer.
Weinberg sophomore Nirav Shah, who is also a res con, said AOL Instant Messenger is also an avenue for virus transmission.
“They’ll get a link from a friend over IM that says, ‘Hey, check this out,’ and they think it’s pictures,” Shah said. “But if you right click on the link and click ‘show hyperlink’ you can see where you’re going before you click on it.”
He also cautioned against opening e-mail attachments with names ending in .zip or .exe.
Reach Elizabeth Sabrio at [email protected].
