On Aug. 19, 18-year-old Xu Yuyu, who was set to enroll at Nanjing Post and Communications University, became the victim of phone fraud, resulting in the loss of her carefully saved tuition fees. After discovering the scam, Xu suffered from a cardiac arrest and passed away in the hospital two days later. This sad story begs the question: how was Xu's personal information leaked?

The fact of the matter is, most students do not have significant income or capital. This ensures that they are not the worst-hit in phone frauds. However, students' personal information is extremely insecure.

On Aug. 25, six suspects working in educational organizations were given prison sentences by the people's court of Haidian in Beijing for illegally obtaining and trading over two million pieces of student information.

An insider declared that it's easy to get students' information from schools and colleges, saying, "I have the statistics on half the schools [in China]. For those I don't have in hand now, if you can provide the names of this student and school, I will get it."

According to some insiders, firsthand student information can be sold for 1 to 2 yuan per piece, and secondhand information is much cheaper. Both can be cheaper still if bought in bulk. In comparison, the price of firsthand personal information leaked from e-commerce sites can be sold for up to 30 yuan per piece. Information on e-commerce, banking and stock market and vehicle trading can all be found within this niche black market.

(File Photo)

A teacher in Beijing explained, "For the purposes of recruitment, some private colleges buy candidates' information from provinces every year after the college entrance examination. Information from hundreds of thousands of candidates has been given out.

"After receiving the information, colleges arrange for their telephone operators to phone the students. Within several days, anywhere from 50 to 69 students have been taken in." The teacher added, "After 2008, the executive departments tried to control the illegal trade, but failed. As the candidates decreased, even public academies were left with vacancies, to say nothing of private colleges. So business began to decline."

According to a specialist on data security, there are three ways for information to be leaked: through those experienced with databases, hackers and third-party service providers.

Another specialist explained that the information of primary and secondary students is kept in an online platform, while the information of college students is kept by their colleges. The diversified platforms for information storage increase the risk of information leakage by insiders.