DeKALB | Throughout the summer, some NIU students received scholarship and financial aid spam in their Z-ID email accounts.

Tanner Bailey, junior political science major, received many emails in his NIU account regarding a $10,000 scholarship before he realized it was spam.

“It had NIU’s logo on it,” Tanner said. “It had a couple of different things that made it seem like it came from the financial aid office…just to Huskie students, but other than that you couldn’t really tell.”

Jim Fatz, director of NIU Information Security and Operations, said NIU has spam-blocking systems, but they are not perfect.

“NIU does have systems that drop spam before it is forwarded to end-users,” Fatz said. “The systems block millions of spam messages a year. What end-users are seeing is what trickles through.”

Fatz said about 80 percent of spammers are from overseas.

“Usually, [people who spam NIU are from] countries such as Russia, China, India, or from some obscure formerly communist bloc country,” Fatz said.

Fatz recommends to update virus protection, operating system patches and have a firewall turned on to avoid spam. He said to be aware of websites that harvest email spam like porn, social media and chat sites.

However, Fatz said spam is part of using the Internet.

“Spam is something that can never be totally controlled or eliminated,” Fatz said. “Spam control is part of an overall strategy that should deal with general computer security.”

Josh Darrah, a senior electrical engineering major, gets spam every day and sees it as fact of life.

“[I view spam] in the same way I find mosquitos as an issue: there’s not much you can do about it,” Darrah said.