As the school year officially kicks off, students everywhere are hitting the books. But it’s also time for IT and security teams as well as administrators to get up to speed on the latest cyber threats that may impact their environment. 

The education sector is a treasure trove of valuable data – from financial and sensitive personal information to intellectual property and raw research data – which makes it an attractive target for threat actors. In fact, cyberattacks against higher education were up 70% last year when compared to 2022. And from Q2 2023 through Q1 2024, 45% of ransomware attacks targeted K-12 schools and 42% targeted higher education.

The threat landscape is incredibly dynamic as threat actors evolve their tools, techniques and procedures (TTPs) to continue to find ways to exfiltrate and monetize data. So, security teams and education leaders must understand the changes that are happening and the challenges ahead to ensure their defenses can keep pace.

Key Challenges

• Limited cybersecurity resources, including weak security policies, inconsistent multifactor authentication (MFA), lack of training, and budget constraints leave many institutions vulnerable.
• Outdated legacy systems that manage transportation, attendance, personal information and more, are prime targets for threat actors who know institutions will be crippled without them and will succumb to demands.
• Dispersed and remote operations make education systems ripe for disruption by ransomware attacks, where every moment of downtime hits students, faculty and staff hard in terms of time and money.
• Increasing protection is difficult without the ability to leverage threat intelligence to understand how the threat landscape is changing, the potential impact to your environment and how to proactively update policies and practices to stay safe. 

How to Create a Leading Threat Intelligence Operation

Protecting students, faculty and staff at primary schools through to higher education and research institutions requires collaboration and threat intelligence sharing between security and IT teams. Look for a technology partner that understands how to ace cybersecurity in the education sector by using threat intelligence to strengthen defenses while maximizing existing resources.

Best practices to help you do more with less include:

• Consolidating all sources of external and internal threat intelligence and vulnerability data in a central repository
• Automatically eliminating the noise to focus on critical assets and vulnerabilities
• Prioritizing what matters to keep your systems running
• Collaborating and coordinating across teams and partners to accelerate analysis and understanding of threats you need to address immediately 
• Automating threat detection and response through seamless integration with your tools and technologies

The ThreatQ Platform equips educational institutions with the context and security they need to make better decisions, strengthen defenses, mitigate risk, and enable collaboration and learning for continuous improvement. And there’s no need to alter existing security infrastructure or workflows; the tools and technologies you already have work seamlessly with the ThreatQ open architecture. 

For more details, download the new Industry Brief – HERE. 

To see the ThreatQ Platform in action, schedule a demo today.