Hacked manuals and tests are full of malware



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It's not easy to be a student nowadays. Of course, your parents could cover tuition with a summer job, but things are different now. Modern university students face high tuition fees, overpriced rents and, indeed, exorbitant textbook fees.

You can not hack a diploma or dormitory, but you can Download this manual recommended by your speaker.

(You know, the one you can not find in the library.) The one that, coincidentally, was written by your teacher and costs $ 70. The one that was used during a lesson for about ten minutes, then quickly thrown on a shelf where The one you could absolutely not buy used, because of a marginal change between versions? No, you are bitter.)

But, again, maybe you should not. Recent research by Kaspersky Labs shows that many illicitly acquired textbooks are plagued by malware. During the last academic year, he identified 356,000 occurrences where one of his users downloaded a piece of infected academic writing.

Surprisingly, over two-thirds of these incidents involved downloading tests. The remaining third came from pirated manuals. Kaspersky divided this last category by showing that textbooks in English were among the most widely used academic texts. Math textbooks followed closely, followed by literature course material.

Kaspersky also described the type of malware associated with pirated texts. The most commonly identified malware strain was the Stalk worm, which spreads on the local network via USB sticks and is often the precursor to a more serious attack.

Although Stalk does not exhibit any immediately dangerous behavior, it can allow an attacker to deploy even more malware.

Commenting on these results, BitDam expert Roy Rashti explained that students should beware of downloading pirated manuals. If they must absolutely use illegal sources, they must take reasonable precautions.

"Opening documents from unknown sources, no matter how attractive, should not be done without skepticism and / or some form of verification of the sender's identity. If you think you need to open a file, be sure to scan it one way or another or open it in a monitored environment. There are free tools like this that allow you to scan files before opening them to validate that they are not malicious, "he said.

In the end, this news from Kaspersky is not particularly surprising. For starters, PDF and Word files have long been used by malicious actors to spread malicious code. PDFs in particular are a well-known attack vector. As Marcus "MalwareTech" said, Hutchins said, "Acrobat is just a set of vulnerabilities that also make PDFs."

But there is also an economic factor. Subsistence and tuition fees for students continue to increase, while their means are not at the rendezvous. According to the US Census Bureau, textbook prices increased by more than 800% between 1978 and 2014, more than triple the cost of inflation.

Services such as Perlego and Cengage may reduce this problem somewhat, but the fact remains that even if university studies remain prohibitive, students will continue to violate copyright law, exposing them to risks. .

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