"Dr. Karen Haynes" Phishing Message

Monday, Feb. 11, 2019

Today, we are seeing another phishing message attempting to collect the user credentials of members of our campus community. This particular message has the subject line, "Professional Program and Ethical Conduct Program For California State University - San Marcos Employees." This message was sent from an off-campus email address, but the signature of the email looks as though it was sent by President Haynes. Please disregard this message as it is not legitimate. Thank you to those of you who reported the message.

When we are alerted to messages like this, we make sure that the "sent from" email address is blacklisted from sending messages to our campus. We also make sure that our campus is not able to send messages back to this malicious actor.

However, these measures only protect users who received the message on campus, so we wanted to alert those of you who may be reading your email from home.

If you ever doubt the validity of a message you receive to your CSUSM email, please contact us at abuse@csusm.edu to verify its authenticity. Otherwise, if you know the sender, you can check with them to see if they sent it.

As always, thank you for your diligence.

CSUSM Information Security Office