I'm still SMRT

 I guess.

So, this afternoon, I was working away on stuff (catch-up grading, assignment details for the future, exam review sheets) and an e-mail came into my inbox:

YOUR CHAIR HAS SHARED (1) NEW DOCUMENT WITH YOU

It looked absolutely echt, the exact style of the horrible online document-sharing system we have for things like scholarship applications.

It was labeled FACULTY EVALUATION and I thought "oh, she must have already read our annual statements" (there were no evaluations last spring, of course.

I was about to click, then I saw it was CCd to literally everyone else in the department including our grad student, and I thought "wait, my chair would never share confidential details like her assessment of my performance.

Then I noticed the "to" field was "itshelpdesk612@g*m*a*i*l.com (just with no asterisks) 

And I thought....maybe still could be but better to check. So I e-mailed the helpdesk and was in the process of composing one to my chair to ask when helpdesk e-mailed back: nope, it's phishing, delete it unread.

Whew.

There have been reports of a few places here getting hooked into some kind of a Cryptolocker scam (or what looks very like it - locally they are saying NOT to remit the funds but to go to a local computer shop because most of the things can be fixed by someone who knows which file to delete, and it doesn't even take wiping the hard drive) but I would much rather NOT even if I have all my important files stored on a couple different flash drives. 

But it does seem like there's been a lot of targeting of schools, and, worse, hospitals, during the pandemic, and I hope the people doing that get bugs in all their sandwiches and itches in places they can't reach to scratch because it seems super scummy to me to take advantage NOW. I mean, it always is super scummy but it seems worse now especially since most of us are at the limit of our mental powers and are perhaps less S-M-R-T than in normal times. 

But I guess again: being extremely suspicious (all the more so now) helps