Google Classroom, a popular educational platform, has been exploited by threat actors to launch a major phishing campaign in a complex operation discovered by Check Point researchers.
Over a single week from August 6 to August 12, 2025, attackers disseminated more than 115,000 malicious emails across five coordinated waves, targeting approximately 13,500 organizations globally.
These entities span diverse sectors including education, finance, healthcare, and manufacturing, with heavy concentrations in Europe, North America, the Middle East, and Asia.
Unprecedented Phishing Campaign
The campaign’s success hinges on exploiting the inherent trust associated with Google Classroom’s infrastructure, which facilitates seamless communication between educators and students through invitation-based mechanisms.
By masquerading as legitimate classroom join requests, the phishing emails evaded initial detection by many email security gateways, leveraging the platform’s reputation to bypass traditional filters such as SPF, DKIM, and DMARC validations that might otherwise flag spoofed origins.
The technical ingenuity of this attack lies in its abuse of Google Classroom’s core functionality.
Invitations from the platform are typically perceived as benign, originating from verified Google domains, which reduces the likelihood of automated rejection by endpoint detection and response (EDR) systems or secure email gateways (SEGs).
Attackers embedded unrelated commercial lures within these invitations, such as pitches for product reselling, SEO optimization services, or dubious investment opportunities, designed to entice recipients into engaging further.
Each email included a call-to-action directing victims to contact the scammers via a specified WhatsApp phone number, a common tactic in advanced persistent scams that shifts the interaction to unmonitored channels outside enterprise visibility.
This multi-stage approach not only circumvents organizational monitoring tools but also exploits human factors, capitalizing on the curiosity or urgency induced by seemingly official educational notifications.
Check Point’s analysis reveals that the campaign’s delivery method involved programmatic generation of these invitations, potentially automated through compromised Google accounts or API abuse, allowing for rapid scaling without immediate red flags from Google’s abuse detection algorithms.
Implications for Enterprise Security
From a defensive standpoint, the campaign underscores critical vulnerabilities in relying solely on domain-based trust models.
Security information and event management (SIEM) systems and intrusion detection systems (IDS) often whitelist traffic from major providers like Google, creating blind spots that threat actors can exploit.
In this instance, the phishing emails‘ payloads were not inherently malicious in code lacking embedded malware or exploit kits but rather relied on social engineering to drive victims toward external fraud schemes.
Researchers noted that the waves were temporally spaced to avoid triggering volumetric alerts, with each surge peaking at different intervals to mimic organic traffic patterns.
For organizations, this highlights the need for enhanced behavioral analysis in email security, incorporating machine learning models that detect anomalies such as mismatched content (e.g., commercial offers in educational contexts) or unusual geolocation data tied to WhatsApp numbers, which in this case traced back to regions associated with known scam operations.
The broader implications extend to supply chain risks, as Google Classroom’s integration with Google Workspace ecosystems means that a breach here could cascade into lateral movement within enterprise networks.
Threat intelligence platforms tracking similar campaigns have linked these tactics to affiliate fraud networks, potentially tied to larger cybercrime syndicates employing business email compromise (BEC) variants.
To mitigate such threats, enterprises are advised to implement multi-factor authentication (MFA) for Google services, deploy advanced threat protection (ATP) layers that scrutinize invitation metadata, and conduct regular user awareness training focused on verifying unexpected communications.
Check Point’s findings emphasize the evolving nature of phishing vectors, where legitimate SaaS platforms become unwitting conduits for attacks, urging a shift toward zero-trust architectures that validate every interaction regardless of source.
As of the latest monitoring on August 25, 2025, residual waves may still be active, prompting immediate reviews of email logs for indicators of compromise (IOCs) such as specific WhatsApp prefixes or anomalous Classroom invitation patterns.
This campaign serves as a stark reminder of how threat actors continually adapt to exploit trusted digital ecosystems, blending technical evasion with psychological manipulation to achieve widespread impact.
With over 115,000 emails reaching inboxes before widespread blocking, the operation demonstrates the scalability of such attacks and the urgent need for proactive, intelligence-driven defenses in an increasingly interconnected threat landscape.
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