Cyber Risks · Cisco Talos

The Internet did my homework

Summary: Cisco Talos observed DNS queries to domains it classifies as "academic fraud" nearly quadruple starting the week of Aug. 12, the most popular US school start week, and found an approximately 4x increase over the same period last year as students moved to virtual learning. Talos also found a copycat site, gceguide[.]xyz, hosting a JavaScript Monero cryptocurrency miner since at least January 2018, and duplicate five-star reviews on the Essaypro Google Play app posted under different names with identical text.

Bottom line: Students researching homework on home networks that are less secured than school or office networks can pull a cryptominer or malicious shellcode onto shared family devices, and the gceguide[.]xyz infrastructure shifted across 8 IP addresses at 4 hosting providers in a single year to stay ahead of blocks.

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Topics
Phishing & Social Engineering
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