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Wednesday
25Nov2009

The weakest link

Every morning when I turn my work laptop on I'm greeted with this message.  Like most organisations we're inundated with phishing emails asking people to give out their user names and passwords.  Inevitably, one or more of my colleagues have responded to these emails and their accounts have then been hacked and used for spamming.  As a consequence Hotmail and other large providers have blacklisted emails coming from our domain.  This has been a real problem for us as many of our students use Hotmail as their primary email account.

Hopefully, this enforced message will change people's behaviour.  However, it makes me wonder how much of a problem this is going to be in the future as we conduct more of our business in the cloud and rely on password-protected hosted services to communicate and collaborate.  Part of the answer must lie in better education of users.

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