Documented social engineering incidents targeting the education sector, sourced and fact-checked.
Researchers from UIUC, the University of Michigan, and Google dropped 297 USB drives across the UIUC campus and found that up to 98% were picked up.
ConfirmedImpersonators posing as two School District of Philadelphia vendors switched payments to ACH and diverted nearly $700,000 into fraud accounts.
ConfirmedScammers hijacked a real invoice thread between an Arkansas school district, its contractor, and its architect.
ConfirmedAttackers hijacked the New Haven school COO's email, quietly monitored a real $5.9M bus-contract payment thread.
ConfirmedA spoofed-email scheme impersonating MacEwan University's trusted general contractor, Clark Builders.
ConfirmedA Tennessee school district's finance director wired $3.36M in state education funds to fraudsters impersonating textbook vendor Pearson from a look-alike.
ConfirmedCriminals impersonated a trusted vendor over email and redirected two building-fund payments totaling $4.92M from a North Dakota school district.
ConfirmedScammers impersonating a school construction contractor sent a forged bank-account-change request, and Cabarrus County.
Social Engineering Examples