BETT: Brunel tackles harrassment with anti-spam

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Violent, threatening emails are now quarantined and trackable at Brunel University, letting the IT team prevent online harrasment and track those guilty to help protect their students.

In a six-figure investment, the West London university signed up for Secure Computing's IronMail system just over three years ago in order to help them manage the deluge of incoming email, but it was quickly put to a more specific use when one of their 13,000 students was subjected to harrasment via email.

The details of the case were just recently disclosed by the university to protect those involved. According to Iain Liddle, policy development and quality manager at the computing centre, a Korean mathematics student was being harrassed by a British-Korean student using the university's own mail service. The harrasser accused victim Kim-Chan Sook of "betraying her homeland" by involving herself with students outside the local Korean community.

Using free web-based email accounts, the harraser sent over 150 messages to Kim-Chan, including death threats, and also sent messages pretending to be Kim-Chan to her classmates.

Liddle said many schools would simply change Kim-Chan's email address, but that her identity at the school was linked to it via her records and mailing lists, so he looked for another solution. Using IronMail, he had the ability to create a specific solution, he said.

"I saw that the solution for spam had all the hoops to allow it to solve this specific problem," Liddle told IT PRO on the sidelines of the BETT conference in London today. "IronMail had the ability to go straight for the jugular on this one."

First, Liddle used IronMail to create a specific anti-spam dicitionary including "a short and nasty dictionary of obscenities in the langauge being used," he explained. This let him flag and quarantine the inbound emails inorder to monitor the situation and see where the mail was coming from.

Liddle said he was convinced the harraser was Brunel-based, but discovered the email was being sent from eight accounts set up in the name of the victim herself - the harraser was using the accounts to send emails to Kim-Chan's classmates which appeared to be coming from her. The mail was being sent from a non-university IP, so Liddle couldn't simply shut it down.

After the emails became more violent, the Metropolitan Police were involved, but said they couldn't take action until Kim-Chan herself made a formal complaint. However, the quarantined emails collected by Liddle would have been good evidence had the case gone to court.

In the end, Liddle's quarantine was so successful that Kim-Chan saw no more emails in the four months to her graduation. "As far as she was concerned, we did exactly what she needed as far as stopping the email reaching her," said Liddle.

Such cases of harrasment by email are brought to Liddle's attention about every three to four months at Brunel, he said. "After the Kim-Chan case, we got better at it, and faster," he said, adding that now his team can react in a snap.

"We have a duty of care to protect staff and students against bad email in the same way as we do as ensuring no bad air in labs," he said. "No asbestos, no spam."

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