CYBER SECURITY SERVICES FOR EDUCATION SECTOR
Schools, colleges and universities are frequently targeted by cyber criminals. Is your organisation proactive, resilient and ready to handle attacks? Only way to find out is to utilise security services for education sector to assess universities & schools specific risks.
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Cyber security in the education sector
Schools and colleges are targeted by Organised crime groups (OCG) to steal personally identifiable information (PII) and to carry out frauds. This information is further sold in the underground markets and is leveraged by fraudsters for identity frauds.
High education and universities involved in research and scientific projects are often targeted by nation state actors to steal useful data including intellectual property. The constant challenge remains managing a good balance of managing assets and protecting these assets with proactive cyber security approach.
Cyber attacks on education sector are only going to grow. The majority of the attacks are targeted attacks and the rest that are untargeted as part of the wider cyber attack campaigns.
What are the key security challenges ?
- Safeguarding student and staff data
- Balancing act against legacy systems, segregations
- Segregations at user, system and environment level
- Protecting multiple sites with standardised approach
- Ensuring compliance (PCI DSS, GDPR)
- Validating mitigations against ransomware attacks
Security challenges in the education sector
In 2019, a report by digital services organisation Jisc reported that penetration testers had 100% success rate during multiple assessments carried out against UK universities. This directly relates to the security posture of organisations lacking cyber hygiene. Technical security assessments are the truest form of assessing gaps in your security controls, and analysing these gaps to find the relevant solutions (could be processes, planned or long term strategic objectives).
Phishing, ransomware and lack of security awareness have been the top three cyber security threats in education institutions. These are low cost, high returns yielding attacks making it an easy business opportunity for crime groups and nation state actors.
More areas such as default configurations around Office 365 tenancy could prove fatal in case of an event. Office 365 best security practices implementation is comparatively (to infrastructure, applications) less resource intensive and should be considered to raise email security profile of an organisation.
Cloud security is an important aspect for any organisation and security strategy should contain secure configuration and validation exercises against cloud assets. These may include insider threat attack scenarios, web application security assessments, securing against API security risks and network security assessments.
What are your key security questions?
- Is your management up to date with cyber risk profile of your organisation?
- How are you safeguarding student and staff data at rest and in transit?
- How are supply chain risks managed?
- Are you carrying out card payment processing PCI DSS compliance checks?
- Is your organisation resilient to ransomware attacks?
- Are you validating new projects, deployments from a third party?
Education Sector Experience
This section refers to specific project based experiences in this sector. These were conducted at universities, private schools and private organisations.
Key Projects
- M&A Due Diligence for a leading education sector software developer
- Cyber assurance against cloud infrastructure rollout
- Wireless Security Assessments
- Web Application Security Assessments (Staff and Student Portals)
- University wide Transformation Projects (Oracle, AIX)
- Internal Infrastructure involving password reviews, patching, and active directory security policy reviews