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A Canadian University Gave $11 Million To a Scammer (vice.com)
A Canadian university transferred more than $11 million CAD (around $9 million USD) to a scammer that university staff believed to be a vendor in a phishing attack, a university statement published on Thursday states. From a report: Staff at MacEwan University in Edmonton, Alberta became aware of the fraud on Wednesday, August 23, the statement says. According to the university, the attacker sent a series of emails that convinced staff to change payment details for a vendor, and that these changes resulted in the transfer of $11.8 million CAD into bank accounts that the school has traced to Canada and Hong Kong. The school is working with authorities in Edmonton, Montreal, London, and Hong Kong, the statement reads. According to the university, its IT systems were not compromised and no personal or financial information was stolen. A phishing scam is not technically a "hack," it should be noted, and only requires the attacker to convince the victim to send money. The school's preliminary investigation found that "controls around the process of changing vendor banking information were inadequate, and that a number of opportunities to identify the fraud were missed."
lol. He was polite enough to update the account details.
The phisher was awarded an honorary degree in social engineering.
Inheritance is the sincerest form of nepotism.
With the cost of tuition and text books, people should be scamming them.
Not really any different than all the shysters applying for grants for research projects at any University and providing bullshit results for the funding and additional funding?
So much research these days is bunk, with stats and results skewed to support predetermined results or conclusions. Worse yet when someone gets a grant without the intention of just bullshitting, not being able to determine a result and skews it to justify funding.
Granted there is sort of a reddit or imgur of research papers but it's totally voluntary. I feel like this could be curbed significantly if people were graded on their paper's quality regardless of where it's published (like the made up publications to 'publish' papers) and universities required a certain karma or what not to obtain funding. IF you were a shitty researcher with consistently unreproducible results? No funding.
A phishing scam is not technically a "hack,"
Unless you're Clinton's campaign man Podesta or the DNC, in which case it's a Super Powerful Russian Hack That Only Trump Could Have Payed For.
Don't disappoint your bird dog. Go to the range.
My city fell for that one.
As copyright owner of this comment, I authorize everyone to defeat any technological measure which limits access to it.
That Canadian's are really nice people!
I know we can't expect a minimum wage paid clerk to understand the content of an email header, let alone know how to display it, but....How hard is it to make A PHONE CALL to said vendor to confirm the change of bank info?
University is pretty much a scam these days, so at this point I laugh at stories like these.
Technically Grant McEwan is not really a university but a college. They were just allowed to change their name a few years ago and don't have an academic research program.
With the cost of tuition and text books, people should be scamming them.
Have you looked at the cost of tuition in Canada? It is far, far less than the US and now even the UK. At UAlberta the typical total tuition costs (all union, transit etc. fees included) for a Canadian (resident or citizen) student taking a full course load are ~$8k/year for science - and those are Canadian dollars so about US$6k. If you want accommodation and food in a residence the cost rises to just under $16k/year (CAD). You can do the calculation here. The institute in question, Grant McEwan, should be even cheaper. Compare that to the standard £9,000 tuition (~$14,500) in the UK and ~US$40-60k for a top university in the US.
As for the text books, those profits go to the publishers, not the university and frankly the price has started to tick off so many of us faculty that we are either writing our own or using free/open resources at least for lower level courses.
"...a scammer that university staff believed to be a vendor in a phishing attack..."
Why would the send money if they believed they were the target of a phishing attack?
they have bankruptcy for student loans
https://www.ic.gc.ca/eic/site/...
The best and brightest amongst us indeed.
"A phishing scam is not technically a "hack," it should be noted, and only requires the attacker to convince the victim to send money." It's also the easiest scam to protect yourself or organization from, all that is required is a bit of education.
It's immoral to let a sucker keep his money.
The story is a bit misleading. The Contractor was actually doing work at the university and was owed money for the work it was doing. What the miscreants did was convince the appropriate university staff to change the banking information they had in their system for the contractor. When their AP department then wired the expected payment, it was sent to the miscreants bank account rather than the contractors bank account. They DID NOT convince the university to send money to the "hackers".
It's only Canadian money, I was worried for a second.