Campuses of colleges for cybersecurity certifications and universities are hotbeds of innovation in a variety of fields, including IT. According to a recent study, attacks that resulted in data compromise happened 101 times in the past year, compared to just 15 cases five years earlier. Meanwhile, two institutions were the target of devastating ransomware attacks at the start of the current academic year that rendered their networks unusable for up to a week.
Why Cybersecurity Certifications Important?
Cybercriminals find colleges and universities to appealing targets. According to the 2019 Verizon Data Breach Investigations Report, 11% of recent attacks on institutions of higher education were motivated by espionage. Also, student, alumni, teacher, and staff demographic that tends to generally well-off information on personal, financial, and physical health can found in abundance in higher education networks. Higher education institutions present chances for adversaries looking to disrupt operational chaos since they frequently serve as a single source for the majority of students’ daily needs who live on campus. However, schools and universities frequently have thousands of privately owned devices connected to their networks, which complicates endpoint security and raises the danger of breaches.
Important Cybersecurity Issues in Higher Education
Reactive Risk Management
Higher education institutions have traditionally taken a more reactive approach to cybersecurity, reacting to threats as they arise. This is due to a number of factors, including limited cybersecurity budgets, a strategic approach to changing IT systems, and a desire to avoid restricting students’ freedom to express themselves freely due to required security procedures. Whatever the causes, today’s advanced dangers are too numerous, swift, and sophisticated for institutions to keep up. Threats cannot detected, addressed, or prevented using conventional security methods. Critical institutional data and systems are exposed to data loss, operational disruption, and outages as a result.
An Expanding Surface for Attack:
Recent years have seen a sharp rise in the number of network-connected devices, many of which are not owned by the institution. According to one survey, students typically carry eight or nine devices to class. Even with the best user education programs, some children are still prone to harmful online behavior. Institutions are using an increasing number of cloud applications at the same time. All of these trends together result in a significantly increased attack surface, necessitating a deliberate, integrated approach to security.
Countering Insider Threats:
Academic institutions are committed to the values of openness, transparency, and information exchange. Threat actors are aware of this and use this climate of transparency to their advantage to conduct attacks that may ultimately endanger free speech. Even internal communication between departments. Faculty, staff, and students can result in incursions in a world where trust is no longer a fixed idea. Whether by real people or hackers posing as them. Institutions struggle to come up with fresh strategies for slicing the network up intelligently and determining if each user and device requesting access is trustworthy.
IT Operations Rationalization:
Many institutions have bought point products to address certain demands as a result of an attack surface that is rapidly expanding. Additionally, they frequently rely on the security features that come standard with each public cloud they use. No matter how effective the individual technologies may. The security architecture as a whole suffers from a lack of integration. Due to the highly compensated cybersecurity employees spending valuable time manually compiling reports and comparing log data. There are significant operational inefficiencies. In the rapidly changing threat landscape of today, these manual processes also hinder threat identification and response.
Keeping Track of Compliance and Reporting on It:
Institutions of higher learning are required to adhere to numerous laws and requirements. To mention a few, they must safeguard research data, electronic health records, grading systems, payment card and bank account information. And personally identifiable information (PII) of students. Also, they must promptly alert students, faculty, and staff of crimes on campus in accordance with the Jeanne Clery Act. Redirecting workers from strategic objectives to compiling compliance reports is not a practical approach because audits happen frequently enough.
