Protection against phishing-mails

Emails that aim to induce the recipient to disclose their username and password, or to unwittingly transfer malware onto their own computer by clicking a link, are known as "phishing" emails. Often the real sender is concealed, or the false impression is created that the messages originate from Trier University of Applied Sciences (or from a person known to the recipient).

Please note the following:

1. We will NEVER ask you to send your user credentials by email or to transmit them to us in plain text by any other means.
2. If you receive an email message from us regarding security-related measures, it will be signed (digitally signed).
   All current email clients can verify this signature. Many webmail interfaces do so as well.
3. We communicate with our customers in German. Aside from the occasional minor typo, we make every effort to use clear and grammatically correct wording.
4. Before entering your university user credentials into a web form, make sure that it is, without a doubt, a service of the IT Department (address, appearance of the website, encrypted connection).
   From a security perspective this is the most critical point, as web pages and URLs are very easy to forge or imitate and the encryption is not always apparent. Always be sure to check whether the context you are moving in (menu structure, linked pages) is familiar.

As a general rule:

• If an email explicitly asks you to open an attached document or click a link, first carefully verify its authenticity. Check whether the language, form and style match what you are used to from that sender. Do not let an alleged sense of urgency unsettle you. If in doubt, it is better to check with the sender through an independent channel.
• If you have disclosed your password by mistake, change it immediately!

To help you better distinguish whether an email was sent to you from within the university or from outside, external emails are marked. The marking is added to all emails that did not originate from the mail servers (gateways) of the IT Departments of Trier University of Applied Sciences or from the e-recruitment portal (BITE), and is visible for all Exchange email accounts in Outlook as well as in webmail.hochschule-trier.de as the email category "EXTERNAL". To make it stand out to you even more, you can additionally assign a custom color to this category in Outlook.

Anyone who uses an email client other than Outlook, OWA or Webmail to read the mail in their university mailbox can make the distinction by means of a filter rule on the header entry "X-Policy-Bank: EXTERNAL", provided that the email client offers the corresponding filter functionality.

You can report a suspected phishing email to us for review.
To do so, forward the email in question to phishing[@]hochschule-trier[.]de