Student’s email accounts are the next target of Hackers

Students have to be very careful with their campus (School/College) email accounts, since many hackers are trying to use student accounts to send spam to other students and to outside emails. This is a common problem in many colleges. Students are seen as easy targets because of their natural curiosity as well as their common need for additional money.

A new study finds that nearly 90% of colleges and universities are putting students, alumni, and faculty at risk by not providing protection from email phishing, spoofing, and forgery schemes. As a result, institutes of higher education have become a hunting ground for cyber attackers using phishing scams.

Business Email Compromise (BEC) attacks are some of the most popular and devastating attacks out there. They work, broadly, by sending an email from a spoofed or legitimate address and then asking someone to do something.

The spoofed address variety is difficult to spot, although a clue usually lies in the reply-to address. When an account is compromised, it is then used to send out BEC-style emails, which becomes really hard to identify.

To guard against these attacks, security professionals can do the following:

• Always hover over URLs to ensure the destination is legitimate

• Always look at sender address

• If ever unsure about an email, ask IT

Though this is an example shared out of the US, this could nonetheless become a reality here in Indian educational organisations and business companies, where an organization in India is being attacked on average 1742 times per week in the last 6 months, compared to 1167 attacks per organization globally and 70% of the malicious files in India were delivered via Email in the last 30 days, according to Check Point’s Threat Intelligence Report. The most impacted industries by attacks in the last six months is unsurprisingly the Education and Research sector with 3,861 weekly attacks in India versus 2,230 weekly attacks globally as per Checkpoint research team.

Cybersecurity should not be limited to the classrooms — virtual or otherwise. Since most home networks do not provide the same increased firewalls or protections offered by institutions, teachers and students become more susceptible to hacking attempts as they spend more time online. It is important to practice safe online behaviour everywhere.

While online learning provides many positive opportunities for learners and teachers alike, it is more important than ever to strengthen cybersecurity defenses to deal with new and emerging attacks.