Overview
Over the past eighteen months, colleges have reported an increase in fraudulent applications - or spam - coming in through CCCApply. Several colleges have reported as many as 10,000 or more being submitted in a single day. This activity of submitting an application for any purpose other than applying for admission to a California Community College is unauthorized use of a system to process or store data.
From being a minor annoyance just months ago, the spike in spam applications is fast becoming one of the top issues for our colleges admissions and IT. The costs are largely hidden but are real nonetheless. They consist mainly of the time staff spend sorting through the legitimate applications to identify the fraud data and keeping it from their student information systems.
However, spam is more than just annoying. It can be dangerous – especially if it's part of a phishing scam in order to obtain passwords, social security numbers, and other personal information, or used to convince an end-user to reveal sensitive information about themselves or internal computer systems.
In addition to being a security risk, spam applications can waste valuable business resources and server space storing and managing them until they are deleted. Along with spam email, surveys, and/or any other unsolicited digital attempt to enter our system, cyber criminals could be using these admission applications to convince end-users (colleges, staff) to reveal sensitive information about themselves or internal computer systems. When a college sends an email to a spammer asking for other information - may allow an attacker targeting our colleges to gain valuable intelligence prior to launching another type of attack.
Up Next: Ways We Are Addressing Fraud in CCCApply