The Internet is a dangerous place. Supposedly an utopian entity where people will regulate one another in order to keep people honest, the reality is much darker.

The Internet is full of people illegally sharing music and movies, posting child pornography, videos of people committing suicide, cyber-stalking and scams out to rip anyone and everyone off. A good example of this is the recent phishing epidemic that hit SF State.

Phishing is an attempt to acquire usernames, passwords or credit card information from people by pretending to be a trustworthy entity.

In recent months, more than 50,000 SF State students, faculty members and alumni have received fraudulent e-mails in which recipients are asked to respond with personal information. The e-mails pretend to be from SF State officials.

The first wave was sent on March 3. It was titled “UPGRADE YOUR EMAIL ACCOUNT.” A recent wave was circulated on March 28. The body of the message said, “On friday, March 28th, 2008, from 7:00 PM until 9:00 PM, all Mailhub systems will undergo regularly scheduled maintenance. Access to your e-mail via the Webmail client will be unavailable for some time during this maintenance window. We are currently upgrading our data base [sic] and e-mail account center - see homepage. We are deleting all Sfsu email account [sic] to create more space for new accounts. To complete your Sfsu Webmail account, you must reply to this email immediately and enter your password here (*********) Failure to do this will immediately render your email address deactivated from our database.”

In the current, fast-paced world, people may not read e-mails closely. A person may read the e-mail quickly and respond with their information without a second thought. It’s important that people remain vigilant of e-mails they receive.

Plus, this incident shows how vulnerable our school is to these kind of phishing scams. Multiple scams in such close time proximity suggests that people responded to the first scam and so the scam had a second round.

When you see an e-mail asking for your password and other personal information, take a breath and ask yourself why someone would need anything like that. If it doesn’t sound right, it probably isn’t.