Phishing mail with the subject " Can you spare some time?"" allegedly from supervisor/colleague.
Phishing e-mails with the subject "Can you spare some time?" allegedly from a superior or colleague are currently circulating again. Delete them immediately. The mails do not originate from TU, but from a Gmail account, which we have now blocked.
The attackers use information from the TU's website to set up the mail address's plain name 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/