The number of phishing attempts is rising significantly and barely a month goes by without reports of another such attempt.
Phishing is the criminally fraudulent process of attempting to acquire sensitive information such as usernames, passwords and credit card details, by masquerading as a trustworthy entity in an electronic communication. Communications purporting to be from popular social web sites (Youtube, Facebook, Myspace), auction sites (eBay), online banks (PayPal), or IT Administrators (Yahoo, ISPs, corporate) are commonly used to lure the unsuspecting.
Today we find yet another attempt which is very specifically targeted at people with maths.ox.ac.uk email addresses.
Hopefully no one is ever fooled by such emails.
A common characteristic of these emails is a request for your username and password or perhaps your bank details or other personal information. This is a sure sign of a scam. The IT team will never ask you for your username and password and in particular such confidential information would never be suitable for sending via email. If you get an e-mail asking you to follow a link to enter your details, don't click it. Instead, go to the main homepage of the site and check the security certificate before logging in and following their links.
As with any IT query or concern if you feel the need to verify with us that a message is a scam please do contact @email. However, in general we will be aware of these attempts and these scams should be obvious and simply deleted.
Wikipedia has a good entry on phishing for those who want to find out more about the subject. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Phishing