oneclass.com, a student studying resource, has spammed its way to notoriety among students at this university.
Students might be accustomed to the occasional errant or unusual message on ELMS, but some have noticed an uptick in suspicious emails this past week.
Message subject lines on this university’s education management website claim to offer “study guides and notes” for the class they are sent to. When students click on the links in these messages, their own Enterprise Learning Management System accounts become hijacked and send similar messages to their class rosters.
These messages began about Feb. 24 and have been circulating during the past week, students said. Patrick Healey, a junior mechanical engineering major, said the peak number of messages he received arrived Thursday and decreased after that.
“I expect [the messages have] popped up in a lot of classes,” Healey said. “I’ve seen them in at least three different classes of mine.”
The messages promote and link to a website called oneclass.com, which is supposed to provide study guides, lecture notes and video tutorials to students who sign up for its service, according to the website. Representatives for the company, which is located in Toronto, did not reply to requests for comment.
Michael Xue, a senior business management and mechanical engineering major, said he saw a message about the website Thursday and trusted it because it came through ELMS, a university site, and he clicked on the link to check out the page.
Xue also entered his ELMS information to sign up for the service, because he thought using his university account information would be safe. The site also resembled the popular website Koofers, he said.
About 10 minutes later, he received an email from a classmate asking when the first exam was going to be. Xue said he had no idea why that student was asking him about a test until he noticed the original message.
“And I look at the email, and it’s [a reply to] the exact same email that I received from the guy from my class,” he said, “but I was the one who sent it out.”
Only minutes passed between the time Xue opened the link and when Xue’s account started sending out mass emails to his classmates.
“It sent out one of these emails to everybody in every single upper-level class I’m in now,” he said, “and the worst part about it is, I’m currently a TA [teaching assistant] for an engineering course, which has 180 students. So being a TA and sending something like that out to students, they’re going to trust that.”
Once Xue realized what happened, he warned his students to not click the link he sent out. He also noticed that a third-party integration had been activated on his ELMS page once he clicked the link, which he deleted by changing his settings. After that, the messages stopped coming from his account, he said.
Shira Winston, a sophomore bioengineering major, said she clicked the link but did not put her information into the site. Still, emails about OneClass went out to three of her classes for a few hours before they suddenly stopped, she said.
“It was sending tons and tons of emails every minute,” she said. “I sat there for two hours just deleting all the sent messages.”
Phyllis Johnson, director of communications and marketing for the Division of Information Technology, wrote in an email that DIT is still investigating these messages.
“The technical glitch was addressed,” she wrote. “The Division of Information Technology is waiting for Instructure [the service that runs ELMS] to provide us with an official report about the glitch that occurred in UMD’s ELMS Canvas.”
