On a regular basis, the Swarthmore community receives emails from malicious individuals requesting their passwords and sometimes other personally sensitive information.

These emails are often cleverly disguised to look like they originated from an official source such as ITS. These attacks on the community are known as “phishing”.
{For more info, see http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Phishing}

Unfortunately, when community members respond to these bogus password requests, it results in their email accounts being used (almost instantaneously) to send massive quantities of spam to the Internet.
{See a blog entry from this summer: Email, Spam & Undeliverable Messages }

Further, this can result in Internet Service Providers (ISPs such as AOL, Yahoo, GMail, Comcast, etc.) blocking legitimate email originating from Swarthmore.

PLEASE remember that ITS will never ask for your password, including by email!! You should promptly discard any emails, regardless of the source, requesting your password or other personally sensitive data.

You can help keep yourself safe and email available to everyone else in the community.