2024-01-22 10:49: Marking of external emails in the subject line from 25 January 2024

In response to the increasing waves of phishing, from 25 January 2024 all emails that do not come from the university's (central) mail servers (ZUV and Communigate) will be marked with the addition [EXTERNAL] in the subject line.

Recently, numerous phishing emails have appeared within the university, in which a known person from the university is supposedly displayed as the sender's name, but the actual sending email address is a random external email address. These phishing emails are a major gateway for malware and are used by attackers to prepare large-scale attacks on the IT systems of organisations.

In response to these increasing phishing emails, it was therefore decided in consultation between the CIO, the Information Security Officer and the management of the University IT Services that the email server settings would be adjusted as follows until further notice: With immediate effect, emails that are not sent from email addresses from the domain "*.uni-freiburg.de" will be labelled with a preceding [EXTERN] in the subject line.

This measure is intended to help you as the recipient to recognise more quickly or to be able to better check whether an e-mail was actually sent by a person from the university or whether an e-mail marked [EXTERNAL] may be an e-mail with fraudulent intent.

This labelling has now also been implemented at other institutions, including the MWK. With this measure, we want to specifically prevent possible threats from phishing e-mails. Please support us in this endeavour.

Further information on phishing and information security can be found on the intranet at

https://intranet.uni-freiburg.de/sazs/sichere-emails
https://intranet.uni-freiburg.de/sazs/info-sicherheit