Protecting pupils, payments, personal data and intellectual property
20th November, 2024 • Online
The education sector is large, complex and connected. How can security professionals deliver defence while maintaining BAU?
Protecting pupils, payments, and IP
In February this year, the universities of Cambridge, Manchester, and Wolverhampton have been hit by cyber-attacks in what appears to be a targeted campaign by the Anonymous Sudan hacker group.
In a post on X, the University of Cambridge's Clinical School Computing Service said that 'multiple universities' were experiencing a Distributed Denial of Service (DDoS) attack and warned that internet access was intermittent.
This attack highlighted the vulnerability of organisations in the sector as well as their attractiveness as a target not simply to economically motivated hackers, but to hacktivist and nation-state actors.
And it’s not just universities. In June, Billericay School in School Road wrote to parents saying that the school had fallen victim to a “significant cyber malware attack”, which shut down their IT network. The school was totally closed to students in years seven, eight, nine and 12 except for examinations and revision classes.
And in May, Embrace Multi-Academy Trust CEO Sharon Mullins said her schools were still feeling the effects of a cyber attack, which happened just before Easter.
The government recognizes the issue and has released data quantifying it. For example:
- Primary schools are relatively close to the typical business in terms of how many identify breaches or attacks - 52% identified a breach or attack in the past year.
- All other types of education institutions are more likely to have identified cyber security breaches or attacks in the last 12 months than the average UK business.
- 71% of secondary schools identified a breach or attack in the past year.
- Further education and higher education institutions are more likely to experience breaches and attacks than schools, and to experience a wider range of attack types, such as impersonation, viruses or other malware, and unauthorised access of files or networks by outsiders.
- 86% of further education colleges identified a breach or attack in the past year.
- Higher education institutions are more likely to be affected by cyber-attacks - 97% identified a breach or attack in the past year. Just under six in ten of the higher education institutions identified that they had been negatively impacted by a breach.
So how can organisations harden security and build resilience as threats multiply?