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.
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