Online Education Due to Covid-19 is Causing Massive Spike in Cyber Attacks on Schools, Colleges

Education institutions across the world, including India, have been pushed to operate online from homes owing to the COVID-19 pandemic. As more teachers and students coordinate classes via the internet, they are constantly targeted by hackers through various forms of malware and cyber attacks. A new report on Friday claims that spear-phishing attacks on Indian schools and colleges via Gmail have increased in September following a drop during the summer vacations (July-August). Spear-phishing is a form of personalised phishing attack that targets a specific organisation or individual, with intentions to steal data for malicious purposes.

According to Barracuda Networks, which tracks cloud-based security threats across various sectors, educational institutions are more than twice as vulnerable to phishing attacks than an average organisation. The company says that its researchers over the last few months, evaluated over 3.5 million spear-phishing attacks executed on various sectors, and it was found that over 1,000 schools, colleges, and universities in India were affected. Researchers at Barracuda also noticed that phishing attacks on educational institutes were mainly carried using two methods between July and September – email scams and service impersonation. In many cases, Gmail accounts were the primary medium for hackers to launch phishing attacks, accounting 86 percent of total spear-phishing attacks, the report notes. These emails via Gmail were part of carefully-crafted business email compromise (BEC) attack, that is a form spear-phishing attack, the company notes.