Cybersecurity is important to protect the privacy of the students’ data and protect educational institutes from cyber threats like malware attacks, ransomware attacks, and phishing attacks.
Educational institutes should give special consideration to cybersecurity to prevent financial loss and disruption in routine tasks and protect sensitive information. With the increase in the trend of online education and Bring Your Own Device rules, cyber threats have been at an all-time high. Cybersecurity in education has also been compromised due to a lack of financial resources and training.
In this article, we will explore the reasons why cybersecurity has become more relevant in today’s educational landscape. The experts at The Academic Papers UK will discuss major cyber threats educational institutes have been facing and steps for risk management and protection against cyber-attacks.
What Is Cybersecurity?
According to the National Cyber Security Centre, “Cybersecurity is the process of reducing the risk of cyber attacks by individuals and organisations”. NCSC further describes that cybersecurity prevents unauthorised access to our digital devices like mobiles, laptops, computers, and tablets to protect students’ personal information.
The Importance of Cybersecurity in Education
Gone are the days when educational institutions were considered safe from malware and other cyber-attacks. Today, especially after COVID-19, cyber threats have become a headache for institutions like colleges and universities.
Cybersecurity in the education system is important for the following reasons:
1. Prevent Financial Damages
There are several instances of flaws in cybersecurity in education where institutes were victims of ransomware attacks and faced major financial losses. To quote an incident, University of Calgary survived a ransomware attack back in 2016 and paid $20,000 to the cyber attackers in order to protect the personal and research data of students and staff.
While the university was successful in protecting the data and attackers didn’t leak anywhere, flaws in cybersecurity were detected. Apart from universities and colleges, primary and secondary schools also faced major financial losses. Private institutes were the major victims as they majorly handle cash flows through systems and their fees are also mostly paid online. Private institutes are also more vulnerable to cyber-attacks than government ones.
To prevent these sorts of incidents, educational institutes must take serious steps. They should sort the budget issues as well, what use of saving money on security and paying more in ransoms? Educational institutes should also provide cyber training to their staff and students to prevent cyber vulnerabilities.
2. Ensure Students Safety
Protecting students and their sensitive information is the responsibility of the educational institutes. Imagine CCTV footage of a school in Blackpool being live on a US website, cybercrime is at its peak right? This might seem like some fictional story but this really happened back in 2018 when camera footage of 3 schools of Blackpool started broadcasting on a website.
Although the footage was taken down in 1 hour, who can imagine the panic and trouble caused by parents seeing footage of school toilets on national media? This and lots of other incidents of the same sort have been happening repeatedly which not only damages the safety and privacy of the students but also affects their mental health.
Apart from these extreme incidents, the theft of personal and sensitive data of students like names and addresses is also a major threat. Educational institutes, especially schools must take bold steps to ensure the protection of the students from cyber-attacks.
3. Avoid Mass Disruption
Cyber-attacks in education have become more common and their major effect is mass disruption in studies and institute’s daily routine tasks. There are instances of cyber-attacks on universities and colleges by their students and teachers for just getting a day off. These are usually DDoS attacks (Distributed Denial of Service) which are easy to carry out especially if the system is poorly protected.
The main purpose of these kinds of attacks is to cause massive disruption in the routine tasks of students and teachers and affect productivity. Although these sorts of cybercrimes are not very dangerous, they do expose the flaws in cybersecurity in education. They also impact the productivity and learning schedules of students.
4. Protect Secret Information
Universities usually have a lot of research work going on at a time, getting that data leaked can spoil hard work of years by different scholars and students. Universities and colleges hold a number of intellectual properties that need to be protected at any cost. These institutes need to enhance their cyber security and data protection as various scientific and research works have already been compromised several times in the past.
While this is quite a serious issue thus requires special consideration and attention by the stakeholders. Taking steps to increase the cybersecurity in education and training the persons involved to protect their devices from these sorts of attacks never has been this important before.
Thus, the trend of assigning assignment writing tasks on this topic is becoming common now. If you are also given a writing task on the same subject but don’t know where to start, we suggest you contact expert assignment writers if you are facing difficulties attempting it.
Cybersecurity Trends in Higher Education
The trend of cyber-attacks is at an all-time high in educational institutes in the UK. According to the research conducted by Sophos, 79% of the higher education institutes and 80% of the lower education institutes were compromised by the cyber-attacks in 2022. Which were 64% and 56% increase from the previous year of 2021 respectively.
The main root causes were compromised credentials and vulnerabilities. Email based attacks were the third biggest cause of those threats. Educational institutes need to take serious action against these attacks, otherwise their credibility is going to be damaged big time.
Role of Cybersecurity in Education
The main role of cybersecurity is to protect the educational systems from being hacked and safeguard student information including sensitive information and research data. But the thing is, cybersecurity has been unable to do the duty properly in the education industry. Of course, the culprit is not the cybersecurity but the operators who are unable to operate it properly due to a lack of resources and training.
The role of cybersecurity in the education sector has been quite vulnerable and needs serious attention from the decision makers. The cybersecurity has been really weak and was unable to protect secret data and students’ privacy many times over the years. And with the advancement of technology, instead of decreasing these attacks, their trend is going up rapidly.
Tips to Secure Education Sector Cybersecurity
As we have discussed along with the explanations, educational institutes need serious revamp in the cybersecurity in education sector. Here are some pro tips for the institutes to enhance the security and protect their information and data from cyber-attacks.
Train All Users of the System
Instead of crying over spilt milk, institutes must train their staff and all the users of the systems about vulnerabilities and cyber threats. This can be an effective way of protecting the systems and avoiding the effects of lack of sources and lack of funding.
Cyber experts should provide all the system users with training or a detailed book containing all the information about what to take care of and tips for cyber security hygiene.
Providing detailed information about the threats and vulnerabilities can be a good step to safeguard the data from future attempts. Of course, one cannot sit and wait for the fundings. And at least the damage caused by the human errors would be taken care off.
Multi-Factor Authentication
Another way the systems can be made less vulnerable to cybercrimes is by asking students to apply multi factor authentication on their devices. This will add an extra layer of security and the fear of unauthorised access will be decreased.
Students should be able to use the system themselves. Requiring less administrative access will help institutes save on extra heads and spend those savings on security and training of the staff and students.
However, all these tasks are time-consuming and require proper training and guidance. If students are busy learning this mechanism, and the deadline for submitting the assignment is approaching. In that case, they should instantly buy their assignments online so that they don’t miss the targeted date. It will not only save time but also help them maintain their grades.
Conclusion
To conclude the guide, the cybersecurity is responsible for protecting the systems, students’ data, private and sensitive information from malware and ransomware attacks. The situation of cybersecurity in the education sector has been vulnerable and has caused many incidents where data and sensitive information were in the hands of cyber criminals and institutes had to pay a heavy amount to recover the information.
Universities and colleges face issues like lack of funds and training which is the main reason for these vulnerabilities. The trends for these issues instead of going down are increasing rapidly and the role of cybersecurity in the education sector is not more than the security guard who is involved with the thieves. We hope you will find these details helpful in protecting educational systems from cybercrimes.
