Last month the DoppelPaymer crime gang attacked Newcastle University with ransomware. With many IT services not operating, the university reported that "it will take several weeks" to address the issues”.
In the UK, 35 out of 103 universities responding to a poll by ToppLine Comms admitted to being attacked by ransomware over the past five years. Of these, 34 said they did not pay ransoms (Liverpool John Moores was non-committal). Of the rest, 25 said they hadn’t been attacked and 43 refused to answer.
But elsewhere ransoms are being paid. Over the summer the University of California San Francisco (UCSF), working on a cure for Covid-19, paid a US$ 1.14 million (£910,000) ransom to the how much does a computer engineer make hacking gang. Netwalker is reportedly linked to at least two other ransomware attacks on universities in the past few months.
Following a spike in attacks during August, the UK National Cyber Security Centre (NCSC) issued a warning for schools, colleges and universities advising them on the steps they must take to ensure they are protected.
The vulnerabilities of educational establishments are not new, and should be better acknowledged. Educational institutions face cyber-threats due to the valuable information stored on their networks and the ability for threat actors to use their network infrastructure to launch operations against other targets. Chris Ross at Barracuda Networks puts it like this: “University servers store a wealth of invaluable data including confidential research and sensitive student and staff information, such as addresses, passwords and even payment details. This makes higher-education institutions a hot target for opportunistic cybercriminals looking to acquire such data for financial gain.”
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