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Legitimate warning email from ITMC's SIC "Your credentials have appeared on the Internet"

If you have received this mail, check if the first two letters or digits match your university password. Only if this is the case, please change your password in the service portal and inform the SIC at info.sic@tu-dortmund.de .

The mail has been sent by the SIC of the ITMC to many TU members and is authentic.

We often receive such warnings from the DFN-Verein (German Research Network), the TU's Internet provider. Based on the affected mail addresses (many old @uni-dortmund.de addresses), we suspect that the cause may lie far in the past. We have not received any further information from the DFN-Verein. However, the cause is usually external web services that use the mail address as a user name and require a login with a password. If such a service is cracked by hackers and the data circulates in the darknet, DFN-Verein sends us information about it, because e-mail addresses of the TU are involved. This means that the incident does not have to be directly related to the TU. Since there are fraudsters on the darknet, it is also possible that it is a matter of collected e-mail addresses whose passwords have been randomly generated in order to sell this data to other fraudsters.