Last week, a faculty member at Eastern received an e-mail that looked quite suspicious. The e-mail said her account had been used to send an unsolicited amount of messages and it was signed ‘the EIU Support Team’.

The faculty member said she is not worried, however, because “this happens all of the time.”

Greg DeYoung of Information Technology Services said there has been one minor virus outbreak in the past 10 years at Eastern, but it was quickly contained and fixed.

When this happens, the computer that is infected can be disconnected from the network so that it cannot spread the viruses throughout the network.

If the proper security is not set on a computer, especially a Windows PC, a hacker can break into that computer and use it to send e-mails, from anywhere in the world, said Doug Lawhead, who is with Macintosh Support in the College of Arts and Humanities.

When the faculty member e-mailed the message in question to Lawhead, he realized that it was sent from a med.umich.edu account (medical center at the University of Michigan), but was signed the EIU Support Team.

“I noticed the sender was not the signer and I know for a fact there is no such animal on the Eastern campus as the eiu.edu support team,” Lawhead said.

Eastern’s only service is the Help desk, and it would have been signed accordingly if it was from them.

Lawhead also noticed there was a zip file attached, but it would not open on Macintosh computers, which says it is a damaged file.

“I suspect that if you open that file on a Windows PC, you might get entirely different results,” Lawhead said. “Who knows what’s going to happen.”

Lawhead said always be suspicious if you get an e-mail saying your computer is sending e-mails because other computers would not know that.

In a lot of e-mail software you can set your option to view long headers, which show you information about the Internet protocol identification number for the sending computer. In some cases, you can even view the servers it was sent through to get to your computer.

When Lawhead looked at the long header in this particular e-mail, he noticed it was sent from an Internet service provider near Fresno, California.

“This e-mail address is probably a valid e-mail address,” Lawhead said.

Upon investigation, he saw that there was an employee at the University of Michigan in the Medical Department, with the same last name as the sent e-mail.

“Anyone can use anyone’s e-mail address and send stuff like this from anywhere on the planet,” Lawhead said. “And on just the initial glance, it will look like it came from that guy but it actually came from someone on the other side of the planet.”

Anyone who might get this e-mail, or one similar to it should delete the message and the attachment to avoid accidentally sending it elsewhere, Lawhead said.

“It can be very dangerous if you just blindly opening this stuff if you don’t know who the sender is,” Lawhead said.

There has been just one faculty member that has reported getting this e-mail so far, but others could have deleted it without knowing.

“Don’t respond to anything that seeks any type of personal information especially if its stuff showing up in e-mails because legitimate businesses just don’t do that,” Lawhead advised. “Its just using common sense when you’re on the Internet doing anything.”

For students, Eastern has purchased Symantec antivirus software, which is a free download.

“Symantec does constant and periodic scans,” DeYoung said. “There are such things called Zero day viruses, which have not been reported and therefore cannot be detected and scanned by antivirus software. However, Symantec does a great job at giving us up-to-minute updates.”

Ashlei Maltman can be reached at 581-7942 or at anmaltman@eiu.edu.