It is a moment of great difficulty for schools, between viruses and distance learning, and now even hackers are taking advantage of it. The alarm is raised by Cisco Talos, the Cisco team dedicated to cyber intelligence and cyber threat research. Cisco has discovered that there has been a 4-fold increase, compared to the same period of 2019, of requests a highly dangerous sites used by students as an additional resource to their training path. Unlike other more direct types of attack such as phishing and malware, the "academic scam" leverages the difficulties and insecurities of the youngest, making it even more sneaky and execrable.
In fact, there are, and are growing dramatically, numerous websites offering help to students to do homework and to take online exams in their place. After all, just give it a try: a simple Google search for the phrase "doing homework" currently generates approx 270 million results, with hundreds of websites offering this type of paid service. To explore the phenomenon Cisco Talos conducted an interesting experiment, trying to pretend to be any student and to access these alleged services. The first thing that catches the eye of the IT team is the huge amount of positive reviews written by users: “Great price, it's so easy, you just place the order, wait and download the document”.
“At a superficial analysis – explains Cisco in a press release – everything seems to be in order, but upon further investigation it is really strange to notice how some reviews are practically identical, differing only by a space or by the addition of some punctuation. The authors of these reviews also have rather common and improbable names: would you trust a review by Mr. Mario Rossi?”. Of course not, but Cisco Talos is currency going all the way and tried to commission a university essay of about 4 pages at a cost of about 50 dollars. After reviewing a list of writers who had numerous reviews similar to those cited, the author was chosen to write a text that deals with data theft and the tools used by cybercriminals to carry out their attacks. Delivery deadline: 11 days.
The text was delivered on time but, although a university level was required, it contained outdated information, approximate statistics and numerous grammatical errors, including in the title. “Cybercriminals – warns the company – they try in every way to capture clicks, in particular they play on the possibility that the user writes the name of a web domain incorrectly. One person's mistake can become a problem for all students and teachers connected to that network, including parents who work from home. Cyber security alone is not enough: students, teachers and parents must make a collective effort to be aware of the pitfalls that the web hides today".
