The news sounded too good to be true for 3,500 students who received an e-mail early Friday morning announcing classes had been canceled due to budget cuts.
One or more e-mail tricksters sent the message, which was signed "Colonel Cathcart," from a WAM lab just after midnight Friday morning. At about the same time, an e-mail infected with the Klez virus, a virus that exploits a weakness in Internet Explorer, was directed to the same group of students.
The Office of Information Technology is investigating both cases, which may be related.
Most people who received the e-mail figured out fairly quickly that it was a joke because of the ridiculousness of the information and several grammatical and spelling errors. President Dan Mote's office received some calls around 8 a.m. Friday, and campus information received about 40 phone calls related to the e-mail hoax.
"It didn't appear to be too disruptive," said Joan Martinez, spokeswoman for OIT.
After a busy week and little sleep, Paul Marcon, a junior finance major, opened the e- mail at 3 a.m. Friday.
"At first I questioned it, and then I closed all my books and I was like, 'All right, I'm done,'" he said. But after talking to a few friends and taking a closer look at the e-mail, he figured there was no way it could be true.
"It really made no sense," he said. Marcon said he also received about 75 e-mails from people on the e-mail reflector asking each other to stop propagating the Klez virus.
Despite attaching "Colonel" to university spokesman George Cathcart's name, Martinez said the perpetrators tried to use the standard format for official university e- mails, including a footnote saying the e-mail was authorized for distribution to the university community.
"The person who created it apparently went to some measure to make it look like an authentic e-mail from university relations," Martinez said.
Cathcart, who was an armed forces lieutenant in the '60s, was away when the e-mail hoax occurred and was insulted when he heard his name had been used with a rank as low as colonel.
"I would have been higher than colonel by now," he said.
After OIT officials figured out that the e-mail had been sent to the GoalsStudy e-mail reflector, a single address that directs e-mail to about 3,500 people, mostly students, they sent an e-mail out to the same group at around 10 a.m. Friday.
They also put a recorded message on the university phone line and Provost William Destler posted information about the hoax on the university home page.
Affected students who were contacted said they did not even realize their e-mail addresses were included in the e-mail reflector.
Martinez said OIT officials are fairly confident they will be able to track down the perpetrators. Once they are found, they will be turned over to university judicial programs, which will determine the appropriate disciplinary action.
Martinez could not reveal which of the eight OIT-managed WAM labs the e-mail was sent from or give any details of the ongoing investigation.
Part of the e-mail read: "As the deadline for the submission of the University's final budget to the state has approached, it has become clear that we are suffering from a large budget shortfall. Because of this, we are forced to shut down the entire campus for a full day. We apologize for the short notice of this cancellation."
This case, Martinez said, is a reminder of how easy it can be to forge e-mail.
"E-mail is one of the most easily forged or compromised mediums," she said. "Always verify anything that looks suspicious or strange."
