Andy Viano of EdTech Magazine has written an article about the phenomenon of ghost students, which are aliases or stolen identities used by scammers and bots in order to gain access to institutional data. These “ghosts” go through the process of enrolling at a college or university for the fraudulent purposes such as accessing and abusing institutional cloud storage, using college-provided VPNs and emails to perpetuate other scams, or applying for financial aid. These ghost students disrupt operations by taking seats and opportunities from real students while opening up cybersecurity risks; pursuing them also takes up valuable IT staff time. EdTech identifies several ways that institutions can protect themselves from ghost students, including by adding in cybersecurity tools like multifactor authentication or by requiring students to physically verify their identity before they can access institutional networks.
