On the night of June 11, 2025, Baylor faculty began to see and respond to the following phishing message. The tell-tale signs that this was a phishing message include:
- Call for immediate action to an immediate, personal concern.
- Sent from a non-Baylor email address (although in the longer tail of this phishing campaign, the emails were sent from compromised Baylor email accounts extending from the original phishing expedition)
- Lack of official university branding, especially on something of this nature.
- Use of a generic signature for what is clearly a direct and likely sensitive personnel-related matter.
- The fact that there is not an Office of Student-Faculty Relations nor an “Academic Standards Committee” (by that name) at Baylor. In addition, there wouldn’t be a “Compliance Division” to a Committee in Baylor’s organizational structure…or really any university structure. The signature line is essentially word soup.
Here is an example of the phishing message:
