Boston, MA – Last week, a fraudulent email that appeared in hundreds of Northeastern inboxes had many students questioning the effectiveness of the university’s anti-phishing algorithm. The program, which had previously flagged multiple updates from Northeastern’s own IT department as “potential scams,” found no issue with a message that contained two sentences of broken English and a non-clickable, shortened link that redirected to a survey requesting the bank details of its respondents. Though most of the students who read the email quickly realized that it was fake, a few were blindsided by the benefits it promised.
“When I saw that email pop up in my inbox, I was ecstatic!” recalled Art major and Women's, Gender, and Sexuality Studies minor Libby Collins, “The weekly salary was more than I’d make at all three of my co-ops put together, so you already know I filled out that online form as fast as I possibly could!”
In a move that many have called “a blatant effort to avoid accountability,” computer science professor Benjamin Lerner revealed that the institution’s current scam-detection protocol was actually copied from a homework assignment submitted for CS 2500.
“When our previous algorithm marked tuition-payment reminders as a top-level threat, we knew that something had to change,” explained Lerner, “but all of Khoury’s faculty were too busy thinking of new ways to make their students depressed, so we didn’t have the time to focus on this much less important issue.”
Their solution? A set of seemingly innocuous homework requirements that when combined, forced all submissions to analyze incoming Northeastern emails whenever they were run. Once all of the assignments were turned in, it was decided that the code written by Keith Chapman and Alan Simmons was the most effective for the department’s needs.
When asked how such an obviously fraudulent email was able to get past their program, both students immediately replied “that was my partner’s job.”
