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CYBER SECURIT Y |OPINION | 61
FUTURE SECURITY CHALLENGES FOR EDUCATIONAL INSTITUTIONS
By David Patrick, Business Technologist at Ntegra H
ow do you balance security against open, unrestrained learning and research that is demanded by educational institutions?
Enterprise security is diffi cult for most organisations, but universities, academies and schools face their own unique set of challenges. Organisations have to face the increased spike in
threats caused by hundreds of students returning from breaks on the same day(s) and wanting to access the network with potentially infected devices. Considering the huge diversity of unmanaged devices, how many go to a security ‘red’ alert during this period? Students have a diff erent view on information
security. They accept that they cannot protect personal information, so when accessing sites there is minimal consideration for the potential security implications. Their main priority is to access want they want however they can, including by ‘shadow’ surfi ng. So the challenge is how to give them the open and transparency access whilst still having the ability to monitor, and protect, for any security violations. Wearables will become the next headache for IT
and will require a rethink on security protection at the end user device(s). When institutions owned the end devices, or the student just had a laptop, security was manageable, but this has rapidly changed as today’s students have embraced BYOD with multiple devices, smartphones, tablets, and now soon to have smart watches. The security industry is discussing the 'senescence of anti-virus', and that anywhere up to 50% of malware avoids detection. So why mandate on anti- virus being installed onto a proportion of the devices (laptops) that are accessing the network? Why not change from including to excluding the protection of end-user devices and instead have a network intrusion detection and isolation security policy? Whilst a recent government report highlighted
that 70% of organisations did not report their worst security violations and breaches, the fi gures showed a slight decrease since 2013. But they have become more sophisticated and targeted, taking less time to produce them, and more signifi cantly taking
With more than 30 years' experience in the technology sector, David Patrick is one of Ntegra’s thought innovators, leading the way for technology innovation and expressing the company's views on emerging technologies across business.
longer to detect. To combat these continual threats, and risks, the educational institutions need to be more collaborative (crowdsourcing) in sharing their intelligence and knowledge about them. The leading universities have another unique set
of problems due to the commercially exploitable intellectual property they hold. With the UK losing some £27bn from cybercrime each year, in 2013 the head of MI5 said that more steps must be taken to protect their intellectual research information as many failed to have existing or strategic cyber-plans. Educational institutions' security strategies need to
fully evaluate the real risks that the increased variety of cyber security threats pose. There are numerous public examples of malware, DOS and web app at acks including the Harvard University website being defaced by activists supportive of the regime in Syria; a major university briefl y blocked the Google Docs service after a dramatic increase in phishing at acks targeting staff and students; and educational staff ’s personal data being exposed on the internet by a Cloud supplier. Security costs will continue to put a strain on IT
budgets. A government survey showed that education spent 8% of its budget on security, one of the lowest across all industry sectors. In the end, security protection is a trade-off between the likelihood and potential impact of threats and the costs incurred to defend against them. Security strategies need continual challenging.
They need to account for evolving security and management needs of data and users; to ensure there is a shared understanding of threats and risks across the institutions; to identify and evaluate information assets for their potential cyber security risk – because security threats are continually changing and evolving. ET
“Wearables will become the next headache for IT and will require a rethink on security protection at the end user device.” David Patrick, Ntegra
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