Everyone with an “@lsu.edu” email address was unable to send messages for a 24-hour period this weekend because of account hackings causing email carriers to block the addresses.The incident, which happened over Saturday and Sunday, was due to an influx of spam being sent out after lsu.edu accounts were hacked, said Sheri Thompson, IT planning and communications officer. “Our ability to send out emails completely died because we got blacklisted,” Thompson said. “No one from lsu.edu could send an email to anyone else.”Hacking into the accounts was a result of phishing scams, or an online scam to get users to enter personal information under the guise of an official email, Thompson said.Thompson said users responded to emails that claimed the account’s 20 gigabytes of ram had been filled up and the user’s password was needed to solve the issue. When the password is given, the account is hacked and begins sending spam mail.”Some of them say the emails are from a ‘system administrator,’ but its not from anyone real,” Thompson said. A similar incident occurred last week, Thompson said, when lsu.edu addresses were blocked by filters at Hotmail and MSN. The threat was quickly contained and the blocks from those carriers were lifted. But the incident on Saturday and Sunday was much more widespread, constituting what Thompson called a “phish frenzy.” Because of the high volume of spam, all email carriers blocked lsu.edu addresses, Thompson said. The block mostly affected faculty and staff members who use the lsu.edu email system. Students who have a tigers.lsu.edu address were unaffected, Thompson said, though messages sent to their lsu.edu address and automatically forwarded to their tigers.lsu.edu address may not have been received. Thompson said it is important to prevent this from happening again, and users can ensure that by not responding to emails asking for any sensitive information. ”We never ever ask you to give your password ever or any personal information over email,” she said.–Contact Ryan Buxton at [email protected]