Google Workspace and Login Chalenges for students

[Stu-Wibird]

Hi

 

We have a primary school who's student users are plagued by 'login challenges' when trying to log in to Google Classroom. These login challenges look on the face of it like 2FA prompts as they often (but not always) ask for a mobile phone number which they send a code to, but unlike 2FA you can enter any mobile phone number as it seems the challenge is just to determine that you are a real person with a mobile phone, and perhaps create an audit trail of who who has accessed the account. It's possible to disable login challenges for a particular user for 10 minutes via the admin centre, but it is not possible to disable them entirely. It is obviously not viable to request that primary aged students use a mobile phone to log in to Google Classroom, and I've not seen this issue at any other schools. There was a password breach at the school in question, but all the passwords were changed and student accounts deleted and re-created since then. Looking at the audit logs I can't see any more attempts to log on from the other side of the world since that was identified and resolved - though I would not 100% trust that I have interrogated the logs in exactly the right way. This is the only thing I can think of that would make this school subject to this problem when others are not. The problem did go away for a while after the accounts were deleted and re-created, but now it has returned.

 

Most recently a child has received the slightly different login challenge message of:

 

Google couldn’t verify this account belongs to you.

Try again later or use Account Recovery for help.If you still can’t sign in to your account, contact your organization’s admin for help. Your admin may need to temporarily update login challenge settings.

 

Which does not allow them to log in at all, and while I have tried following the step to temporarily disable login challenge and log them in, the problem returns again after the 10 minutes is up.

 

Does anyone have any experience of this, or suggestions of what we could try?

[MrEprise]

Check under 'Account settings' --> 'Profile' in the Google Admin console and check to make sure 'Organization type' is set to 'Primary/Secondary Education'. We were getting lots of security challenges and ours was set to 'Higher Education' and only because our Tenant was originally set up by a former Headteacher.

[Stu-Wibird]

I think that might be it! It was set to 'Higher Education' as yours was. It was set up as part of the DfE funded scheme during Covid, so I'd expect the approved people who set it up to have addressed that, but apparently not!

 

Fingers crossed that has fixed it for us, but I will report back next week to confirm and help future me's who search out this thread.

 

- - - Updated - - -

 

Check under 'Account settings' --> 'Profile' in the Google Admin console and check to make sure 'Organization type' is set to 'Primary/Secondary Education'. We were getting lots of security challenges and ours was set to 'Higher Education' and only because our Tenant was originally set up by a former Headteacher.

 

I think that might be it! It was set to 'Higher Education' as yours was. It was set up as part of the DfE funded scheme during Covid, so I'd expect the approved people who set it up to have addressed that, but apparently not!

 

Fingers crossed that has fixed it for us, but I will report back next week to confirm and help future me's who search out this thread.