Students in Peter Trubowitz's Government 360N class received an e-mail Feb. 29 that every student hopes to get the night before an exam.
It said, with no explanation, the test was postponed until a later date, according to Katherine Sayre, a journalism senior and student in the class.
Unfortunately for the students, Trubowitz said the e-mail was sent from a student in the class pretending to be him.
The student even went so far as to create an e-mail account using Trubowitz's name, the government associate professor said.
"Whoever did this spent a lot of time compiling e-mails that might have been better spent studying for the exam," Trubowitz said.
The incident prompted an investigation by Information Technology Services and could lead to further investigations by Student Judicial Services and the UT Police Department, said Angel Cruz, director of ITS.
ITS does not keep a count of how many such incidents occur each year, Cruz said, but there aren't many.
"On the rare occasions we receive reports like this, we investigate," Cruz said. "If we can identify a specific person who is responsible, we forward that to human resource services or Student Judicial Services."
Cruz said the individual responsible for the e-mail has not been identified.
"It's an ongoing investigation," he said.
Cruz said the student hacked into the Blackboard computer service to deliver the e-mail, but there were no indications Blackboard had been "breached."
Thirty minutes after the e-mail was sent, Trubowitz said, he sent an e-mail instructing his students to ignore the first e-mail.
Sayre said she knew this e-mail was from the real professor because it came from a "mail.utexas.edu" account.
Only a few students failed to show up for the exam as a result of the e-mail, Trubowitz said.
This incident came only days after another false e-mail was sent through the Student Government ticket Focus' listserv claiming SG presidential candidate, now president-elect, Brent Chaney, was resigning.
Focus spokesman Jason Rickle told the Texan in February that ITS was having trouble identifying who sent that e-mail because the person used a public computer, and no surveillance cameras were located near the computer.
These are hardly the most serious security breaches the University has faced.
Last spring, Christopher Andrew Phillips was charged with hacking into UT databases and downloading names, addresses and Social Security numbers.
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