Cyber Threat & Vulnerability: The Security Risks - A Visual Presentation

In order to better understand the "Cyber Threat & Vulnerability Series," we have prepared the following visual presentation to help you gain perspective in how vulnerable your children are when using TurnItIn.com. As Parents, educators and guardians of our future leaders, you must understand how this one system can not only compromise you, but the children you have brought into this world, or are responsible for on a daily basis as educators. This series is to alert you to the seriousness and potential harm it could put your child in, through no fault of your own. 

As depicted in this slide, when a student submits their application for college, they are required to include all personal information: name, address, phone number, social security number of both themselves and their parents. They are also required by the software to include parents’ occupational information and point of contact number for parents’ employers, along with financial information from tax returns.  Upon acceptance to college, they are required to submit all assignment papers to instructors and TurnItIn.com plagiarism system for comparison to all known documents on the web as well as Turnitin's own database system of held documents from previous students. Based on our investigation, the database held by this privately owned company based in Oakland, California, with international headquarters in Newcastle, England, has the potential vulnerability to be compromised in many ways. We will not disclose the capabilities to hack into this system for obvious reasons. However, the vulnerabilities of this system are plentiful. Accordingly, the risk of all users to include their information in this database affords hackers, and nefarious individuals the opportunity to steal identifying information of both the students and their parents – not to mention stalkers, sexual predators and other persons wishing to cause irreparable harm to students in any specific area.  See Scenario 1 and 2 for how easily it would be for a student to be harmed, and the potential security risks for our country to be harmed at the same time. 

With a unique sales staff who are trained to use covert tactics in selling their product, similar to the old car salesman tactics, any unsuspecting high school principle, dean or president of a junior college will fall prey to the opportunity to help their students succeed.

Outside of financial gains, let's look at the legal side of this investigation. 

How does any private business achieve such success without spending a dime on legal fees? They manipulate the legal system by hiding behind their customers. 

 

 What are the risks to academic institutions?

 What type of remedy does a parent or an academic institution have to stop this type of security risk?

Invited co-author of this article, Sean McGowan is published author, a teacher of Civics and American History, as well as a Chaplain.