IT Teams Spacecrafts Escaping the Black Holes of Cyber Threats
Education Cybersecurity Weekly is a curated weekly news overview for those who are concerned about the Education industry. It provides brief summaries and links to articles and news across a spectrum of cybersecurity and technology topics that are specific to the industry.
Guess, what is the least secure sector among 17 industries studied in a recent research? Yeah, education. When it comes to information security, data confidentiality is only a tip of a huge iceberg.Cybersecurity is the Achilles heel of the education industry
EdTech Magazine on December 14, 2018
Guess, what is the least secure sector among 17 industries studied in the recent research? Yeah, education.
The education industry seems to be the most desirable target for hackers due to the huge amount of students’ personal data. Moreover, the presence of intellectual property related to corporate and government research makes this industry more attractive for attackers. Indeed, there are three basic points of university network vulnerabilities:
- Application security. Educational organizations use online applications for testing, data collecting and analytics. In addition to regular pentesting, it is essential to build application security into the system development.
- Endpoint security. While the number of personal devices used by students and faculty is expected to grow, the endpoint security software may become a solution to minimize the potential risks.
- Patching cadence. Updating software will not take much of your time but will protect the system from current threats.
An obsession of education sector admins (spoiler: network attacks)
eSchool News on December 14, 2018
The next philosophic problem after squaring the circle is balancing of educational organizations between access to their IT-resources and information security.
According to the latest research, more than 70% of district administrators and IT leaders are worried about the network security of their organizations and potential cyber threats. What is noteworthy, the increase of cloud applications, used by students and faculty, is the main reason for IT teams concern.
Furthermore, 55% of respondents in urban districts identify “safeguards to protect the privacy of digital student data” as a top requirement when planning for new digital initiatives.
Most administrators say the effective use of technology in school is extremely important to prepare students for the future. As more technology is introduced, and at a time when hacking is a serious concern in most industries, we see schools taking this issue very seriously. No one wants to put student data at risk.
Dr. Julie Evans, CEO of Project Tomorrow
What are pillars of Higher Ed information security?
EdScoop on December 12, 2018
When it comes to information security, data confidentiality is only the tip of a huge iceberg. Although a failure of confidentiality has a demonstrable impact on end users, cybersecurity professionals in Higher Ed should consider two more important factors in their work – availability and integrity of the university IT resources.
Availability means that students, faculty and staff can log on these resources wherever and whenever they need. Actually, the rise of DDoS attacks on campus networks shows the failure of the availability concept. Moreover, university IT departments sometimes cannot bring systems back online while an attack is still going on.
Warranting the integrity of university resources is another issue for IT teams. The accuracy of information is a key factor of trust for the information security professionals. However, there will always be people, trying to compromise users’ data (for instance, students dissatisfied with their grades).
Thus, information security is something more than just ensuring data confidentiality.
Think like Iron Man, be strong like the Hulk – the recipe of engaging students in engineering
Education Technology on December 14, 2018
The world needs new superheroes. Here is their to-do list: solve the problem of climate change, provide clean water and energy in developing nations, make people live healthier. Sounds impressive. Probably, even Iron Man would not manage these tasks by his own. However, the UK government’s Year of Engineering campaign has teamed up with comic brand Marvel to bring up young superheroes and engage them in studying STEM disciplines.
The collaboration website includes an aptitude test for children to determine which superhero capabilities they possess and how it can be suited in engineering, the real life superhero studies, revealing the stories of engineers, and a curriculum linked lessons.