Students should be careful when opening emails in their student accounts, as some spam emails make it through NIU’s filtering system.

Spam emails through student email accounts have been landing students in technical support because of hacked accounts. Distinguishing the spam emails from regular emails can be hard since most of them look like they’re legitimate and coming from another student, professor, or even the university. A lot of the emails contain links that should not be clicked. The interaction is more likely to get their accounts compromised.

Dan Barnett, lead tech at NIU’s Technology Support Desk, said NIU uses Bayesian filtering to catch a majority of spam emails by analyzing word pairs usually associated with spam and assigning a score to the email that says how likely an email is spam. The email will be marked as spam and filtered out after a Bayesian filtering gives it a certain number of points, Barnett said.

“What you try and do with that, not just NIU but with any institution, is you want to find a balance between what point threshold is going to catch a lot of spam but isn’t getting what we call false positives: It’s not catching emails that are legitimate and important and marking them as spam,” Barnett said.

Junior journalism major Tia Pugh said she receives spam emails through her student account.

“As soon as I’ve seen it’s a little sketchy, I put them in my spam folder,” Pugh said.

She said since she started putting those emails in her spam folder, she hasn’t received as many as before. The spam Pugh had been receiving includes emails offering her a job, but she said she hadn’t opened them because they were “too good to be true.”

Barnett said emails are doubly protected because in addition to Bayesian filtering, there is another filtering system provided by Google for students. It evaluates the content of the email and matches it up with known spam, and in turn, drops it in the spam folder. The Google filtering system also looks at emails that were manually put in the spam folder to anticipate what future spam will look like, he said.

“If you’re having trouble with spam … the good first step is to start going in and moving those emails to your spam folder,” Barnett said. “It’s not just a container for spam; it also is teaching Google what to look for.”

Despite the double protection, some spammers know how to create emails to make it around the filtering systems and into students’ inboxes.

“I got emails saying that someone was trying to hack my account from Russia,” said freshman psychology major Karina Alcantara.

Because the Bayesian filtering gets rid of the more obvious spam emails, it makes it harder to distinguish the real emails from the fake, but that should make students more cautious.

Alcantara said when her account was hacked, someone was using her Z-ID to send out spam emails. Other students have gotten emails saying they’re from banks or even from the “NIU security team.”

James Ingallino, ITS Contact Center Support Specialist, suggested students use the CanIt-Pro anti-spam software to block messages from certain email addresses. The personal email block list can be made at canspam.niu.edu.

There are other things students can do on their own to increase protection from spam. Barnett said students should remember to never click on links or fill out forms through their email that seem to be from NIU. The university will never ask students to put their passwords in an email or attach a form that asks for their password. He said the NIU student email should be used for communication within NIU only because it will be less likely to get compromised.

“The number one reason you get spam is from signing up for things and it may get sold to spam,” Barnett said.

Barnett says to make a separate email account for ‘fun’ because those email accounts are more likely to get hacked.