Cybersecurity Awareness

We continue to see phishing attempts via text message and to personal Gmail accounts as well as CUIMC user accounts. We appreciate your vigilance as it is critical that we continue to exercise extreme caution and thoughtful judgment when opening, responding to, or clicking on links to professional and personal email and text messages. This includes CUIMC email as well as any personal email accounts through Gmail, Yahoo, AOL, etc. While we cannot prevent phishing attempts, we can train ourselves and our staff to follow best practice guidelines and report suspicious activity. 

To ensure your safety and that of the CUIMC community: 

• Do not give out sensitive information via work or personal email. Social engineering is the process of deceiving individuals into providing personal information to seemingly trusted agents who turn out to be malicious actors.  
• Always verify the authenticity of requests from companies or individuals by contacting them directly. If you are asked to provide personal information via email, you should independently contact the company directly to verify this request. 
• Be suspicious of unknown links or requests sent via email or text message. Do not click on unknown links or answer personal questions sent to your mobile device, regardless of who the sender appears to be. 

Please see Information Security's Don't Get Hooked page for additional information on how to protect yourself and your team from falling for phishing attacks. 

Cybersecurity is paramount; please forward suspicious emails as an attachment to CUIMC IT via spam-abuse@cumc.columbia.edu for review. Our team will also answer any questions that you may have.