Good afternoon, everyone.

This is week three of Cybersecurity Awareness Month. The theme for 2026 Cybersecurity Awareness Month is Don’t Make It Easy for Them; and by building and repeating strong security habits every day, we can all make life more difficult for the cybercriminals. Each week this month I am giving simple tips for how to stay safe online. Today’s topic is Reporting Phishing.

Phishing emails are created by cybercriminals in an attempt to get something from the recipient. That “something” is personal information, such as Social Security numbers, driver’s license numbers, birthdates, financial information, and passwords. The cybercriminals make the emails look and sound like they are coming from a trusted source and often stress urgency to get the recipients to act quickly. As a quick reminder here are some of the red flags to watch for:

• Does that sense of urgency exist and does it leave you feeling that you will face consequences if you don’t respond immediately?
• Does the sender use a personal address from @gmail.com, @hotmail.com, @yahoo.com, etc., but are supposedly emailing about a business-related matter?
• Does the sender’s display name differ from the actual email address?
• Does the email ask for sensitive data?
• Was the email unsolicited?
• When you hover over the email address or a link, does it show a different address than what you see without hovering?

If you answered “yes” to any of these questions, you are almost certainly looking at a phishing scam. The absolute best thing you can do is to report it immediately. Just click the red Report button on the upper left corner of your Outlook ribbon, then choose “Report Phishing”.

There is always the possibility that you may get a reply saying the email was found to be “clean” but please don’t stop reporting! UT is using a detection tool that specializes in Behavioral AI. It is mapping out systemwide communication patterns, which helps prevent email compromises and impersonations based on behavioral abnormalities. This tool blocks about 99% of the scams before they reach our inboxes. However, there are some scams that can make it through due to the design of that type of attack. And sometimes the tool decides that the email is clean because it views it as “junk” instead.

It is so important to report phishing attempts. Just like with any criminal activity, if you see something, say something. When you report something that is potentially dangerous, it starts a workflow that can help prevent that danger from occurring by literally pulling hundreds of emails from the inboxes of others. For those few scams that the tool sees as clean, your reports help train the tool on a different type of design so it can recognize it in the future. In addition, when we all report phishing, we are protecting our data, coworkers, students, customers/clients, families, and ourselves, which is something you all do so well!

This is a great time to complete your Cybersecurity Awareness Training if you haven’t already. Just log into K@TE using your NetID and password, then look for the 2026-2027 Compliance UTK training. The training package is role-based so there are different names, but the Cybersecurity Awareness training is one of the assignments within that package.

• If you get an error that says, “This file can no longer be accessed,” or the training hangs up, there is something most people have in common that leads to this.
  • The security awareness training has been known to not work as well when using the Firefox browser.
  • If you get the error or the hanging and you are using Firefox, please log out of K@TE, then close your browser and try again using either Chrome or Edge.
  • If you had been using Chrome or Edge and this happens to you, log out of K@TE, then close your browser and try again with the other browser.
• If you have not completed the training by the deadline, you will lose access to almost everything using the NetID for authentication, including email, until you log into K@TE and complete the training.
• Once the training has been completed, the access will be restored but may take 2-3 hours to fully restore.

Thank you all for everything that you do to keep the Institute and its data safe. Please don’t ever hesitate to let me know when you have questions or concerns!

Sandy

Important Note: Thank you so much for sharing these e-newsletters with family, friends, clients, students, and anyone else who may benefit from the information. I would like to stress that you should keep your students in mind, as non-employee students will not get this information without someone sharing. If anyone has an email group for students who are not employees of your department, please let me know what that address is, and I can include it. I do this as a blind copy so student names and addresses will not show up!