How To Protect Education Industry From Cyber Attacks?

Cyber attacks have become very common in the education sector these days, it is the duty of the educational institution to ensure safety before an unfavorable incident of data breach takes place.

FREMONT, CA: Data breaches is increasing day by day, and companies across many industry verticals fall victim to what now seems to be a regular occurrence. The field of education is also no longer unaffected from this. Any institution can hold important data pertaining to students personal, medical, or financial details. Universities hold data related to researches, important information of faculty and staff that tend to be confidential to a certain extent. As the technology advances so do the capabilities of hackers to gain data even from secured storage environments. Avoiding cyberattacks may not be 100 percent possible, but measures can be taken to protect one’s data from such a situation.

Here are three ways to tackle cyber attacks:

1. Shift the focus to prevention, not mitigation

Schools are becoming the target of cyber attackers because the schools have more than 2,500 students, and still they have not assigned a staff to handle cyber security. They should change their mindset now rather than waiting for a threat to happen and then respond they should take preventive measures before any incident occurs. Educational institutions have to handle a bulk of sensitive data daily, so they should ensure the security of the data by storing it in the proper place.

2. Minimize internal threats

The schools which are adopting more and more cloud applications must also improve their security posture to prevent an internal incident. Recently some schools have transitioned to the cloud, and some are still on the way to transition may not realize cyber security means more than securing a network with firewalls and gateways. It is also necessary to secure data that is stored in the cloud environment. As per Data Breach Investigations Report of Verizon 2019, almost nearly 32 percent of breaches involved phishing, 34 percent involved internal actors, and that errors were causal events in 21 percent of breaches. If all the organizations start focusing on cloud application security properly, then fewer internal threats will happen throughout the academic year, and it will also prevent sensitive data from leaving a school’s environment.

3. Aim to prevent data loss

There are several data security and privacy requirements mandated by specialized laws and regulations. Some of them are Family Educational Rights and Privacy Act (FERPA), the Children’s Internet Protection Act (CIPA), the Children’s Online Privacy Protection Act (COPPA); the educational institutions must fulfill these laws. Attackers are becoming more sophisticated in their attacks, and it’s high time for schools to become more advanced in their defenses.

See Also: Top Cyber Security Solution Companies