3 in 4 Education Institutions Have Uncovered a Cyber Attack on Their Infrastructure in the Past Year -- THE Journal

Research

3 in 4 Education Institutions Have Uncovered a Cyber Attack on Their Infrastructure in the Past Year

By Rhea Kelly
09/12/24

Seventy-seven percent of institutions across K-12 and higher education have identified a cyber attack on their infrastructure within the past 12 months, according to a new survey from cybersecurity company Netwrix. That represents a significant increase from 2023, when 69% of education organizations reported the same.

For its 2024 Hybrid Security Trends Report, Netwrix surveyed 1,309 IT and security professionals from a variety of industry sectors in 104 countries, to find out about their IT infrastructure, security challenges, and more. Education-specific survey results were released in a separate report, "Additional Findings for the Education Sector."

The most common attack vectors in education were phishing, user account compromise, and ransomware or other malware, the report found. Of the institutions that experienced a security incident, 47% reported facing unplanned expenses to fix security gaps, while 42% said they experienced no impact. Other cyber attack consequences included compliance fines (cited by 14% of respondents), change in senior leadership (11%), loss of competitive edge (11%), and lawsuits (10%).

Respondents were also asked about their biggest data security challenges. Fifty-one percent pointed to a lack of budget for data security initiatives; 47% said mistakes or negligence by business users; and 45% said an understaffed IT/security team.

"While educational institutions may have the same complexity as large organizations, they typically lack matching budgets and resources to deal with their dynamic environments," commented Ilia Sotnikov, security strategist at Netwrix, in the report. "It is crucial for the IT security teams in the education sector to have processes and tools in place to govern the identities, audit their activity, and monitor for any abnormal or malicious behavior."

For the full report, visit the Netwrix site here.

About the Author

Rhea Kelly is editor in chief for Campus Technology, THE Journal, and Spaces4Learning. She can be reached at [email protected].

E-Mail this page

Printable Format

Featured

Report: Enterprise AI Workloads Are Tipping Toward Private Cloud

Broadcom's 2026 Private Coud Outlook report says enterprise AI is moving from experimentation into production, with private cloud emerging as the preferred deployment environment for AI inference among surveyed organizations.
Survey: Agentic AI Moves from Pilot Phase to Production, Bringing Governance to the Forefront

A new report from Caylent, an AI-focused Amazon Web Services Premier Tier Services Partner, found that enterprises are already moving agentic AI beyond pilots and into production environments. At the same time, organizations are putting strict conditions around autonomy, making governance and control the next major challenge for enterprise AI adoption.
AI Leaders Warn of Risks at United Nations Security Council Briefing

The heads of OpenAI, Anthropic, and Hugging Face recently joined AI researcher Yoshua Bengio at the United Nations headquarters in New York to warn the UN Security Council about the security risks of increasingly capable AI.
Apple Unveils Redesigned Siri AI

At its recent Worldwide Developers Conference, Apple announced Siri AI, a redesigned version of its voice assistant that Apple describes in its own announcement as "a profoundly more capable and personal assistant." The update is intended to make Siri more conversational, more context-aware, and more useful across iPhone, iPad, Mac, Apple Watch, and Vision Pro.