As you may have noticed, the amount of spam and phishing messages in your Inbox is increasing.
First, this is because criminals become more active in an attempt to carry out more ransomware and phishing attacks. Secondly, this is due to our filtering lagging behind. The University uses SURFmailfilter. This has been underperforming considerably in the last year. SURFnet has therefore decided to look for a replacement product. This selection is expected to be ready by the end of this year.
We have also looked into ways to improve filtering locally, including making use of Microsoft's Exchange filtering. However, we noticed this causes a large increase in the number of false positives - email messages that are not spam but still end up in the Junk folder. This has a major impact, not only on mail sent externally to the university but also on mail internally. We have therefore decided not to activate this filtering.
We apologize for the inconvenience. We hope, with you, that this problem will be solved quickly. In the meantime, we ask you to report, especially phishing and spam with malware, to CERT-UT (cert@utwente.nl). If we are informed in time, we can add specific rules to the filter to block similar attacks.
