Introduction: Academic fraud through grade alteration has become a growing threat for educational institutions at every level. Below, we outline the most common modalities, attack vectors, and techniques used to modify grades, along with a compendium of security controls and best-practice defenses.
Forms of record alteration range from external intrusions to deliberate abuse of internal privileges. Understanding each modality is key to designing effective controls.
| Attack vector | Typical actor | Brief description |
|---|---|---|
| External intrusion | Student or third party with technical skills | Installation of keyloggers, exploitation of leaked credentials, or SQL injections against grade-management systems (SIS/LMS). |
| Internal abuse | Teacher, administrative staff, or executive | Using legitimate privileges to inflate or “clean” records. |
| Identity spoofing | Student who obtains someone else’s credentials | Access via teacher/secretary account through phishing or weak passwords. |
| Backup manipulation | Careless or malicious IT personnel | Restoring back-ups with modified values or deleting logs to hide traces. |
| Technique | Operational detail | Recommended mitigation |
|---|---|---|
| Physical keylogging or malware | Silent capture of credentials while typing. | Locked BIOS policies, restricted USB ports, multi-factor authentication (MFA). |
| Privilege escalation in LMS/SIS | Exploiting misconfigured roles or default passwords. | Periodic role reviews, least-privilege principle, strong passwords and rotation policies. |
| SQL or script injection in forms | Manipulating queries to overwrite records. | Input validation, parameterized queries, WAF. |
| Abuse of legitimate access | Teacher or administrator edits hundreds of grades unchecked. | Dual approval, immutable logging, real-time alerts for bulk changes. |
An organized attacker typically combines the tactics described above into a five-step kill chain:
Early detection and compensating controls can disrupt the chain at any stage.
MANDATORY
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