The IT department is asking for help from both the students and faculty at Bakersfield College.

According to David Palinsky, Kern Community College District director of information technology, some employees have responded to a phishing e-mail that is causing problems for the IT department.

“Employees have responded to this e-mail and provided their username and password information to whoever is sending out these e-mails,” Palinsky said. “Then the spammers are using that information to send out countless e-mails.”

Once notified of the event, the IT department will immediately change the user’s password so they no longer have access to their accounts. The employee then has to notify the IT office to have their password changed, which gives IT a chance to re-educate the employee on BC’s Acceptable Computer Use Policy.

Palinsky also stated that giving out usernames and passwords to any other site other than a true BC site for the purposes of logging in is a violation of board policy.

“There will start being consequences for continuing this behavior,” he said. “But it will be taken on a case-by-case basis, and the intent is to show the offender that this is a serious issue.”Palinsky also said the real problem comes not in the spamming itself but in the blacklisting of the BC domain by other sites.

“Blacklisting means that our valid e-mails are no longer received by the intended recipient,” said Palinsky. “Once we’ve been blacklisted, we have to contact the site that blacklisted us and try to get that status removed. It’s a very long and sometimes difficult process.”

David Barnett, IT representative for the BC campus, said that employees aren’t the only ones being targeted by the spammers. “Students are also receiving these e-mails,” he said. “We had one case where the student input her login credentials and in the space of two days, over 20,000 e-mails were sent from her e-mail address.”

BC would like both students and faculty to be aware of these e-mails and the fact that they’re being sent out.

Amber Chiang, head of media relations at BC, gave her own warning. “The college will never ask for your username and password in an e-mail, and both students and faculty need to be aware of this,” she said. “If they see an e-mail asking for that information, delete it and do not enter any information that could compromise your account or our system.”