According to the latest survey done on cyberattacks in the education sector, 87% of educational institutions have faced at least one successful cyberattack in the last year. Moreover, 73% of these establishments still feel unprepared to avoid future attacks due to the lack of technologies and strategies in place. The post pandemic era has undoubtedly created a paradigm shift in the way we learn, teach and work. STEM (Science, Technology, Engineering and Mathematics) education, in particular, is rapidly incorporating technology in its methods, steering away from traditional forms of teaching. With the inevitable rise of virtual learning and teaching, it is vital that both students and teachers are protected.
In the past year, instances of cyberattacks have grown exponentially in the education sector – whether it is ransom attacks causing financial damage or malware attacks resulting in data breaches and mass disruption. Educational institutions are entrusted with their student’s private data. By making sure that a strong cybersecurity infrastructure is in place, these institutions can feel more confident in safeguarding sensitive information.
In the JISC’s 2018 Cybersecurity Posture Survey, IT professionals within further and higher education were asked to name the major cyber threats facing their institutions, and the top three answers can give us an insight into the most common ways education networks are breached.
- Phishing: Phishing scams take the form of an email or instant message and are designed to trick users into trusting the source in a fraudulent attempt to access their credentials. In this case, it would likely be sensitive student data or confidential research. This was highlighted as the top threat facing higher education institutes, suggesting hackers typically target the sector using this method.
- Ransomware/Malware: These prevent users from accessing their network of files and cause disruption and tends to infect devices using a trojan, a file or attachment disguised to look legitimate.
- Lack of Awareness: The third threat listed by professionals was found to be a lack of awareness or good old-fashioned accidents. Although these threats take on different appearances, human error plays a key component in each of these.
OpenText’s Education Software Solutions
As an OpenText company, Carbonite and Webroot bring a range of solutions to ensure the data you rely on remains secure and accessible. OpenText for Education helps K-12 and higher ed institutions build trusted and secure digital ecosystems with solutions purpose-built for the industry.
Content: OpenText for Education enhances the availability and value of information across educational ecosystems. Educational establishments can now leverage OpenText education management solutions to extract and access student data trapped in unstructured texts and improve data governance to guarantee consistent and relevant content delivery.
Security: OpenText for Education addresses risk, information security and digital investigation needs with industry-leading forensic-grade solutions. With the help of OpenText’s indexing functions and automatic processing, schools and universities can focus on investigating and discovering elusive risks, threats and anomalous activities instead of analysing data.
Data Backup: The key thing to understand is that the responsibility to back up data falls on the shoulders of the educational institutions rather than the software vendor. Data loss happens for a lot of reasons however, the majority being a human error and not a computer. This could be anything from a malicious hacking attempt to accidental deletion. Now, whilst Microsoft 365 data enables you to restore an entire site collection, mailbox or user, it does not include the ability to perform granular restore. Carbonite Backup for Microsoft 365 is purpose built for backing up data in Microsoft’s suite of productivity applications and it is designed for the types of everyday data loss events that the education institutes are likely to face.
Block and protect: Endpoint security is not enough to keep your school’s computers safe from sophisticated modern cyber threats. With Webroot DNS Protection, administrators can block threats at the domain level, apply leading web classifications, enable policies by group and device and reduce costs associated with infections on your school’s devices.
Modernise digital experiences for educational institutions with OpenText solutions. Discover more here: https://www.cmsdistribution.com/vendors/carbonite-and-webroot
