This Is REAL. Acclaim is the company subsidiary of Credly who is handing out UMBC digital badges.
As a part of UMBC’s ongoing effort to protect our data and computing environment, the Division of Information Technology (DoIT) developed a cybersecurity training course. This course will help ensure that community members know the risks posed by the sensitive information we work with, common threats to the campus, and ways to report suspicious activity.
The training is required by the University System of Maryland and the Maryland Office of Legislative Audits and everyone who has completed the training is going to be receiving Employee Cybersecurity Awareness digital badges from Acclaim. Acclaim is the company subsidiary of Credly who is handing out UMBC digital badges.
If you found the email (from an organization you were not familiar with) asking you to click on a link (that made no sense to you) to be suspicious, please know that we applaud your instincts. By all means, continue to be suspicious of unsolicited email asking you to do things for no reason you understand. We thank those members of the UMBC community who have brought this message to our attention.
In this case, the message is not a form of phishing or otherwise malicious..
You may click on the “Accept your badge” button if you wish to claim your badge. These digital badges are used to showcase successful completion of training and cyber security awareness on most professional networking sites like LinkedIn.
As noted before, please continue to exercise caution in all your communications. If you receive any suspicious message, you can send it to us by forwarding it to security@umbc.edu.