Protection against phishing mails

E-mails that aim to induce the recipient to disclose his or her user name and password or to unconsciously transfer malware to his or her own computer by clicking on a link are known as "phishing" e-mails. Often the real sender is hidden or the false impression is given that the messages originate from the Hochschule Trier (or from a person known to the recipient).

Please note the following:

1. We will NEVER ask you to send your user data by e-mail or otherwise send it to us in plain text.
2. If you receive an e-mail message from us regarding security measures, it will be signed (digitally signed).
   All current e-mail clients can verify this signature. Many webmail interfaces also do this.
3. We normally communicate with our customers in German language. Apart from possible minor typing errors, we make every effort to use understandable and grammatically correct wording.
4. Before entering your university user data in a web form, please make sure that it is unquestionably a service of the computing centre (address, appearance of the website, encrypted connection).
   This is the most critical point from a security point of view, as web pages and URLs are very easy to forge or imitate and the encryption is not always visible. Always make sure that you are familiar with the context in which you are moving (menu structure, linked pages).

Basically the following applies:

• If you are explicitly asked to open an attached document or click on a link in an e-mail, first carefully check its authenticity. Check whether the language, form and style correspond to what the sender is accustomed to. Do not be irritated by an (alleged) urgency. If in doubt, it is better to ask the sender about an independent way.
• If you have passed on your password by mistake, change it immediately!

To make it even easier for you to distinguish in future whether an e-mail has been sent to you from within the university or from outside, the computer centers have implemented a special marking of external e-mails. The marking is added to all e-mails that were not originally sent from the mail servers (gateways) of the Trier University of Applied Sciences data centers or from the e-recruitment portal (BITE) and is visible for all Exchange mail accounts in Outlook and in Webmail.hochschule-trier.de as the e-mail category "EXTERNAL". To make it even more conspicuous for you, you can also assign an individual color to this category in Outlook.

If you use an email client other than Outlook, OWA or Webmail to read the emails in the university mailbox, you can make the distinction using a filter rule on the header entry "X-Policy-Bank: EXTERNAL", provided the email client has the corresponding filter functionality.

You can report a supposed phishing e-mail to us for verification.
Please forward the e-mail in question to phishing(at)hochschule-trier.de