Spam Emails from Google Groups

Several senior university officers have reported receiving a substantial number of Google Groups emails in their university inboxes. These were reported to OxCERT and our team have been investigating these reports in the last few days. 

You also may have found more Google Groups emails in your university inbox. The subjects vary from offering very 

personal services to promoting a political (and occasionally aggressive) agenda. 

Unfortunately, Google have set up Google.groups to a default of auto-accepting group invites. The owners of these group sites have picked up your email address and, on investigation, dozens of other .ox.ac.uk in the last few weeks. A similar thing has been happening with personal WhatsApp groups for some time.

Since Google.groups has legitimate use and may be important to other parts of the university, we cannot block all the source @googlegroups.com address, therefore our current filters are not able to pick these emails out and stop them ending up in your inbox.

What should you do?

•    Do not click on the link inside the email 
•    Right-click on the email and mark it as Junk. You may have to do this multiple times for these emails to go into your Junk. 

The Information Security team is closely monitoring this situation. Please report any suspicious emails to oxcert@infosec.ox.ac.uk and familiarise yourself with our guidance. 

Please report suspicious emails early. The university fosters a no-blame culture, and we would like you to report early so we act quickly to keep you safe.