![]() ![]() The influx of federal emergency aid and the shift to remote learning - which makes it easier for scammers to hide behind a screen rather than appear in person - have made the community college system even more attractive to bad actors, college officials say. ![]() “The code is obviously floating around to do this to a handful of colleges.” “The thing about this is that it’s not hard to do,” said Nick Merrill, a cybersecurity research fellow at UC Berkeley. In a follow-up video, he mentions that the bot is no longer functioning due to security updates to the community colleges’ website, but encourages viewers to make their own changes to the code. Within seven minutes, “Targetter” had enrolled at Contra Costa College as Ivan N. “All I have to do now is just sit back and relax,” he says as the bot populates a Contra Costa College application with fake personal information. San Jacinto College, San Francisco City College and Sacramento City College. Another pop-up screen provides options to “enroll” at one of four listed California community colleges - Contra Costa College, Mt. “It’s all automated, you don’t need to do anything,” the YouTuber says as code scrolls in a pop-up window. edu email using a bot downloadable from his account bio. In a video from “Targetter,” a YouTuber who appears to be based in India, he walks his 70,000 viewers through the process of obtaining a. edu email address for free or discounted access to software, online shopping and digital music. ![]() While reports of fraud have increased recently, cyberattacks on the state’s community colleges aren’t new - and the perpetrators don’t necessarily have to be sophisticated hackers.Ī quick search on YouTube shows countless videos detailing how to make fraudulent student accounts to get a. Scammers seek student email addresses, federal aid This week, the California Student Aid Commission told the Los Angeles Times it had identified more than 65,000 applications for aid from purported community college students that appear to be fake, lending credence to the idea that scammers are seeking to get their hands on state grants.Īnd in a memo to colleges Monday, the community college system’s vice chancellor for digital innovation and infrastructure, Valerie Lundy-Wagner, announced new security measures to combat the threat. “It’s a well-orchestrated, analytically led assault on the weaknesses in our system,” Hope said. They say the system is being targeted partly because it is open enrollment and does not have an application fee. And identifying and blocking the fake student accounts is taking up considerable staff time, college officials say. The Chancellor’s Office estimates that about 20% of the traffic coming to the system’s online application portal is from bots and other “malicious” actors.īots are filling up classes, in some cases preventing real students from enrolling. At least 10 districts or individual colleges have told CalMatters they’ve had increases in fake applications, registrations, financial aid filings, or some combination of the three. Officials with the 116-college system say they are seeing a spike in cyberattacks since the pandemic, which they suspect is because the scammers are targeting federal COVID-19 relief grants along with traditional financial aid. If they hadn’t, about $1.7 million would have landed in the hands of fraudsters.Ĭhaffey is not the only California community college to report such a scam, according to a CalMatters investigation. Faculty and staff caught onto the scam before any dollars went out, Hope said. The shocking answer? These weren’t real students, but scammers likely out to bilk taxpayers of millions of dollars in financial aid. Hope, the head of instruction at Chaffey College, a community college in Southern California’s Inland Empire, dove into the college’s records to find out why. On the first day of spring term this year, an aeronautics professor came to administrator Laura Hope to share something suspicious: Most of the students in his virtual class weren’t participating at all. At least 10 districts or individual colleges told CalMatters they’ve been affected, and the community college system has announced new security measures to combat the scam. Bots are filling up community college classes in a likely attempt by scammers to fraudulently access COVID-19 relief grants and other financial aid. ![]()
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