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Another scam e-mail with the subject "Are you available" or in Finnish "Hei oletko käytettävissä? "allegedly from a supervisor/colleague

Please delete this mail and do not reply.

Phishing e-mails purporting to be from a supervisor or colleague with the subject "Are you available?" or the same text in Finnish are currently circulating again. It is to be expected that the senders will notice your mistake and also send a German-language variant with the subject "Sind Sie verfügbar?".

Delete them immediately. The mails do not originate from TU, but from a Mail.ru account, which we have now blocked.

The attackers use information from the TU's website to set the plain name of the mail address in such a way that the mail looks plausible.

The plain name of a mail can contain any text, just like the sender of a physical letter, e.g. "Olaf Scholz". There is no technical way, other than using signed mails with certificates, to prevent this. Unfortunately, many mail programs, such as Outlook, no longer display the mail address if a plain name is specified in the mail header. It is also easy to forge sender addresses, however, we now observe more often that people do not take the trouble and just forge the plain name.

However, in Outlook you can switch on the display of the sender address permanently for a folder in the overview:

View - Add Columns - New Column - "Formula" - Add "[searchfromemail]" and group it appropriately with "up".

In the Thunderbird mail program, this functionality is easier to implement via the "Full Address column" add-on.

Incidentally, the attackers' scam is well known. After contacting them, the attacker tries to persuade the victims to purchase vouchers for their superiors, e.g. for Amazon. In such cases (payments/solicitations from superiors) we always advise to have it confirmed on an independent channel by phone.

More information on phishing can be found in our online IT security training, which is now also available in English:

https://it-sicherheitsschulung.tu-dortmund.de/bits/en/