As some of you have noticed, a few days ago there was some odd site behavior and downtime at CC. The following message is being sent to all registered members via email. Since this process will take a period of hours, and CC users who aren’t registered won’t get the email, I’m reproducing it here verbatim:
I’m curious if any parents who are on CC received an e-mail today asking them to participate in a survey:
"You have been invited to participate in an important survey about your child�s college application process.
To get started, please click the link below. If you cannot view or click on the link, please copy the link and paste it into your browser. [I’m not providing the link]
We appreciate your participation. Your responses will be kept in the strictest confidence and will be used for research purposes only. The survey should take about 20 minutes to complete.
Thank you for your help!
Best Regard,
Survey Administrator"
It was from <a href="mailto:invite@surveysavvy.com">invite@surveysavvy.com</a>.
I don’t know why (it seemed sketchy) but I clicked on link and there was no identifying information on why the survey was being conducted or who would receive the information. I did not complete the survey but I’m wondering if it was connected to the recent security problem on College Confidential.
Nothing to do with CC, MSNDIS, we don’t do unsolicited surveys.
Also seems unrelated to the security issue, which seemed more aimed at trying to trick users into giving up Twitter or Facebook credentials, but it’s impossible to say for certain.
Thanks for the quick response.
lol, that email was ludicrously sketchy.
So I am suppose to email myself with questions? lol
Roger –
Thanks very much for posting the information from the email. As I suspected, the CC forum was hacked last week. I appreciate that the users are being kept informed of this incident.
Wondering how many CC users got the above email. If CC’s user database information was indeed compromised than the email could be sent to CC users to transmit a virus.
Also, if the hackings were occurring between Feb 5th -10th and the “effects being mitigated” each time, why weren’t we notified earlier?
We got a spam email overnight telling us we had exceeded our mailbox capabilities and to sign into a link within twenty four hours to avoid having our account suspended. We did not follow the link. The email had gramatical errors. I wonder if that email was related to the CC hack problem. We have not received any email notification from CC.
I just checked and I got the email.
Just a quick note to assure folks that the email from CC about this topic is totally safe. Not only has the CC site been secured, but the email is sent from a totally different set of software and servers.
Having said that, you should ALWAYS be careful opening any email. Daily, I get emails that appear to be from legitimate businesses, friends, etc., that were not sent by those entities. One particularly devious tactic seems to be identifying a name you have interacted with in social media and then spoofing an email from that person. I’ve never clicked on the link in those emails, but I’m sure it leads to someplace I don’t want to be. So, examine both the sender info and the destination link very carefully before clicking or even viewing images in the email.
Thanks for your patience, our upgrades this morning seem to be doing fine.
Roger, I was asked about this by a friend who got the e-mail but hasn’t been on cc in years as both of hers are happily in college (why does THAT stop her from staying on cc???). Anyway, she asked how to deactivate her account. Is there a way to do that?
Not “deactivate” per se but anyone can edit their profile to remove any personal info entered and even change the email address to something different.
I did not mean how many people got the email from CC. I meant how many got a spam email similar to the one mentioned above which asked a user to click on a link which could enable a worm to be uploaded. The reason I asked is because if we are all suddenly seeing them then it could indicate that our email address and other data on CC’s servers has been aggregated by someone.
At this point there is no reason to believe this has happened unless a number of CC users suddenly come forward about similar emails. Btw, I never get any spam so the one I received was disconcerting.
Also, my question was not addressed as to why we weren’t warned earlier about the spam attacks and being re-directed to other sites. This seriously puts our computers at risk and any financial data we have on them.
^^^ Sorry meant “hacker attacks” not “spam attacks”.
roger?, any reason CC keeps logging me out now? have had to log in every time i leave the site or if open but extended time away. changed password as suggested…
Never got the email, have been registered for years, and also have to log in each time. Seems like CC needs some serious upgrades.
Can you tell me where to go to change my password?
This assumes you’re logged on and in the forum section. Near the top of the page is a horizontal blue bar that runs the width of the page. The leftmost link is “My Control Panel.” Click it.
In the middle column under the main heading “Your Control Panel” and the sub-heading “Settings & Options,” click “Edit Email & Password.”
In the form that appears, enter your current password, enter your new password, and confirm your new password.
Click “Save Changes.”
Mom. my control panel.
Additionally, my computer had a virus that took over after I had been connected to CC. Not sure if anyone else has reported this. I got rid of it, but it was trying to sell me virus protection software, and was saying that every site I went to was infected. Can’t say for sure it came from CC, but that’s where I had just been to when the virus took over. I couldn’t even bring up the task manager to kill the processes. The solution was complex, but the first step was to download a virus killer renamed as iExplore.exe, so the virus on my machine thought I was starting up internet explorer.