Report: e-Learning Data Breach Exposes 1 Million College Students’ Data

Over one million students that have used the OneClass e-learning platform may have had their personal data breached. A report published on Thursday suggests that the popular educational platform experienced a significant data breach this week, creating a “goldmine for criminal hackers.”

A report by vpnMentor published on Thursday claims that OneClass, an online learning platform, experienced a serious data breach this week.

The report claims that a vulnerability in the OneClass platform “created a goldmine for criminal hackers” by offering them access to over 1 million private student records.

“It contained over 27 GB of data, totaling 8.9 million records, and exposed over 1 million individual OneClass users. The database contained different indices, each with different types of records related to students using the platform, those who had been rejected from joining, many university professors, and more,” the report reads.

The report suggests that the breach could put students at risk because young people are often more vulnerable to online schemes. Moreover, the breach may have exposed families to financial risk, particularly those parents that paid for the OneClass service with a credit card.

“Furthermore, OneClass users are very young – including minors – and will generally be unaware of most criminal schemes and frauds online. This makes them particularly vulnerable targets. It’s also likely many of them use their parent’s credit cards to sign up, exposing their whole family to risk,” the report stated.

An online security research team at vpnMentor discovered OneClass’s vulnerabilities during their work on a web mapping project. The team said that the platform’s user database was completely unsecured.

“Our team was able to access this database because it was completely unsecured and unencrypted,” the report noted.

Breitbart News reported in April that 77 percent of college students felt that the quality of their education decreased when classes moved online in March at the outset of the Chinese virus pandemic.