The Technology Services Help Desk can assist with the following resources, and can be reached by email at consult@illinois.edu or by phone at 217-244-7000.

Directory Suppression

When someone's record is suppressed from the Illinois Directory, their contact information (including name, phone, email, and office) is no longer visible on the public-facing website.

Directory suppression also hides a person's first and last name from their contact card on the internal Global Address List, so that they only appear in Microsoft Teams and Outlook when their entire address is manually input.

These mitigations can help prevent further harassment by reducing the discoverability of an employee's information.

Directory suppression can be performed by Technology Services in coordination with the employee's Human Resources office. An HR representative should send an email to techservices-iamu@illinois.edu and the Identity & Access Management team will help assess the best course of action.

Email Filtering

This type of attack often involves harassing emails sent to the victim's Illinois address. There are a few tools available to help prevent this.

University work computers usually have the 'Proofpoint for Outlook' Add-In installed, which will provide a Report Spam button. This will delete a message and indicate to our email filtering system that similar messages should be treated with suspicion.

Outlook also includes filtering tools for incoming emails. If these messages match a particular pattern, such as repetitive emails with offensive or derogatory language, the Rules feature can be used to find and immediately discard them. For more information about mailbox rules, please see the support article Microsoft Outlook - Set Up Rules.

If there is a specific example message you'd like our Security team to examine, please use the Forward As Attachment function in Outlook to send it as a .eml or .msg file to security@illinois.edu and describe the situation.

For instructions on how to forward email messages as an attachment, please see Office 365, Email, Exchange, Forwarding Email Messages as an Attachment

Department Websites

Many individual departments list faculty and staff on their websites separately from the main public directory.

Technology Services can help you find contact information for the IT group in control of your department's web content.

Any changes made to department websites is handled by your IT Group. These changes cannot be made by Technology Services.

Other Online Presence

Many external social media profiles can be set to restrict viewing access or block communication from strangers. Some social media providers also offer a reporting system where harassing posts and messages can be shown to content moderation teams.

Contact the provider of any social media service through which you are being harassed, and ask about what options are available.