
Top stories






More news









Marketing & Media
Chicken Licken bravely debones a rare phobia with their latest campaign
Joe Public 2 days





Construction & Engineering
US shuts down massive Lesotho development project



While some might find the cost of student books to be quite expensive, they are an inevitable part of any educational programme. As a result, many textbooks can be found online, and students might avoid the high costs by downloading them from pirate websites or file hosting forums, along with student essays.
Threat actors, however, are willing to create mischief and use students’ hunger for knowledge and academic success as an opportunity to distribute malware.
Overall, there were 17,755 threats disguised as student books, and most often, these were falsely circulated English (2,080), math (1,213) and literature (870) textbooks. The vast majority of threats hiding under these disguises were downloaders of various files: from annoying, yet not fatal adware or unrequested software, to highly dangerous money-stealing malware.
The remaining 35,776 threats were disguised as essays and student papers on various topics. As researchers were taking a closer look at them, they noticed something unusual.
In 35.5% of cases, the most popular malware was an eight-year-old worm – an outdated type of threat that is not often seen in use nowadays. It was actively distributed through a specific attack vector - USB-sticks. Upon closer examination, the experts came to the conclusion that the worm ‘lives’ on computers at student printing services, that are often used for years without regular security updates and run old versions of operations, getting there through what seems to be a student essay that needs to be printed.
“Students attempting to avoid paying for textbooks and other educational materials creates an opportunity for cybercriminals that they simply cannot resist. This turns into are a serious problem for educational entities, as once the infection gets on a school network computer, it can easily spread. Not all schools are prepared to carry out effective incident response, as educational organisations are considered to be an a-typical target for fraudsters, but threat actors use every opportunity they can get. This is why precautionary measures are vital for such organisations,” said Maria Fedorova, security researcher at Kaspersky.
Safety tips
To not fall victim to malware, students are advised to:
Kaspersky advises universities and schools to do the following: