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Student surprise: malware masked as textbooks and essays

Posted on September 3, 2019 by Dissent

From the Kaspersky Team, this useful alert:

We have written on numerous occasions about how easy it is to inadvertently pick up some nasty stuff when you try to download popular TV shows or game cheats. However, cybercriminals do not just limit themselves to entertainment products. You can also stumble upon a virus when looking for work- or study-related materials. This is particularly important to keep in mind as the academic year starts. That is because the cost of textbooks and other materials for K-12 and college students often leads to many looking for more affordable and free alternatives online.

So how many of us actually thought to warn our kids about downloadable textbooks posing risks like this?  Or sites with student papers that they might visit? Sure, I would expect that most parents who read my sites would have “The Talk” with their kids about malware and risks, but might kids naively think that only applies to torrent sites and not school-related sites? Take a look at these statistics:

As it turns out, over the past academic year, cybercriminals who have been targeting the field of education have tried to attack our users more than 356,000 times in total. Of these, 233,000 cases were malicious essays that were downloaded to computers owned by more than 74,000 people and that our solutions managed to block.

About a third of those files were textbooks: we detected 122,000 attacks by malware that was disguised as textbooks. More than 30,000 users tried to open these files.

Read more on Kaspersky, and then have another talk with your kids, perhaps?

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