Tag Archives: Education

How the UK’s education sector can tackle a new ransomware spike: Pt 3

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by Jonathan Wharton-Street

The UK’s schools, further education colleges and universities are increasingly in the crosshairs of global threat actors. Why? Because they’re viewed as easy and potentially lucrative targets: with few resources to spend on cybersecurity, but at the same time under great pressure to keep classrooms open. Combined this with large volumes of sensitive personal and financial data and you have a perfect target for a ransomware group. 

In the previous two parts of this blog series, we explored the main threat vectors used by these groups, the potential impact of attacks, and recommendations from the National Cyber Security Centre (NCSC) on how to stay secure. 

Now it’s time to offer our own advice for education institutions, and show you how Trend Micro products can help.

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How the UK’s education sector can tackle a new ransomware spike: Part 2

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by Jonathan Wharton-Street

The UK’s schools, colleges and universities are currently experiencing a surge in ransomware attacks, according to the National Cyber Security Centre (NCSC). While organisations in many verticals are being targeted by the same financially motivated threat actors, the education sector has arguably more to lose than most. With schools and unis playing catch-up after a year of lockdown disruption, they can ill-afford more set-backs due to digital extortion.

Fortunately, best practice security to help mitigate risk in this area needn’t be onerous. The NCSC and Trend Micro have a wealth of resources and capabilities to help protect your organisation.

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How the UK’s education sector can tackle a new ransomware spike: Part I

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by Jonathan Wharton-Street

Ransomware threats have been building for several years. With the barrier to entry lowered considerably thanks to “as-a-service” affiliate programmes, threat groups have thrived. Along with healthcare, the education sector was hard hit during the height of the pandemic, particularly in the UK. Unfortunately, the risks are no less acute in 2021: the National Cyber Security Centre (NCSC) has recently issued a new alert warning of a surge in attacks on schools, colleges and universities. 

From speaking with customers in the education sector, we understand that the lack of centralised visibility and management across hybrid environments and systems has put a strain on resource to manage the disparate systems / consoles by multiple vendors, but more importantly that this has created a risk of threats been missed or a delay in seeing them until too late. We also understand that 3rd party Research which brings in much needed revenue to Higher education customers, is an areas that most concerns them from the threat of ransomware.

In this first of a mini blog series on ransomware in the education sector, we take a look at the scale of the threat, and where resources should be best directed to mitigate it.

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