Tag: Cybersecurity

Raising cybersecurity awareness among education professionals

“No one is immune to a breach of their sensitive data”

One consequence of stay-at-home orders due to Covid-19 was an en-masse transition to working from home. Many educators and students were forced to make quick adjustments without safe and reliable procedures or equipment. 

As a result, 2020 was particularly severe for school hacks, exposing many people to identity theft and credit fraud, and forcing school closures.

If you are not a cybersecurity expert, it can be hard to understand the difference between an incident and a breach. Each results in implications for security, compliance, and the organisation’s reputation.

Yet it is critical for each employee and student to follow guidelines and rules to prevent a security crisis. So where is a good place to start learning about cybersecurity? Mailbird’s Carl Andre-Brown explains.

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How can universities protect themselves from cyber attacks?

“One of the reasons why HE could be targeted by cyber criminals is that it holds lots of personal data and intellectual property that can be sold to information brokers”

As details of a recent ransomware attack on a top UK university unfold this week, Andrew Blyth, director of the Cyber Defence Centre at the University of South Wales, reflects on the lessons learned from the Wannacry cyber attack on the NUS and how the higher education sector can arm itself against cybercrime.

How did the NHS Wannacry attack happen and why?

There are two major lessons that we can learn from the Wannacry ransomware outbreak of May 2017. The first is the need to practice basic cyber security hygiene in terms of patch management, antivirus and firewall management. The reason for this is that the Wannacry ransomware used the MS17-010 vulnerability to attack unprotected computer systems. Microsoft had, in the weeks before the Wannacry outbreak, published a patch which was developed in response to the MS17-010 vulnerability. You may say that if all systems had been patched then the outbreak on the NHS systems would not have happened.

However, such a simple assertion ignores the second lesson.
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