Indian Student Data Weaponized for Phishing, Social Engineering, and Financial Fraud

India's education sector is being targeted by organized cybercriminals who are trading millions of student records on dark web markets and using them for highly targeted phishing, cloned websites, identity theft, fake fee collection, and mule account operations. CYFIRMA's research alleges datasets of over 12 million records and other large caches (≈682k, ≈46k) were advertised, and real incidents include cloned university fee portals and bank mule schemes; the report urges stronger access controls, third-party risk reviews, MFA, domain monitoring, awareness programs, and coordination with banks and law enforcement.