All these days we have seen an increase in ransomware attacks against healthcare companies. Now, news is out that the attacks related to file encrypting malware have doubled in 2020 on Universities, especially involved in the development of Corona Virus Vaccine.
According to a research carried out by BlueVoyant on over 2702 Universities operating across 43 countries, almost all of them were found to be facing ransomware attack as the number one cyber threat. And on an average, the cost of payments made to hackers reached $450,000.
Security experts say that the increase in attacks was witnessed because many of the educational institutes switched to remote teaching/learning, exposing their networks to the sophisticated hacking techniques like social engineering attacks.
As there is an enormous demand for the credentials of university students on dark web, some hacking group are readily offering such information for less than $250 for over 10k accounts. This is making hackers purchase such stuff and launch cyber attacks.
Threat actors are always on a lookout for vulnerabilities to be exploited in the networks of educational institutes and so universities are being urged to increase their defense line by solidifying their Cybersecurity posture as this not only helps in keeping cyber crooks at bay but also help reduce the crime to a large extent by demoralizing those who want to earn illegitimately.
Keeping up a disaster recovery plan in place, creating an awareness among employees about the threats lurking in the current cyber landscape, and having in-house threat monitoring solutions can help in defending the IT infrastructure of the educational institutes from all variants of cyber attacks.
