By : Bakinam Khaled
With the school season approaching, parents hurry to get their children supplies while students enjoy their last days of summer.
However, barely anyone realizes that enterprises in the education sector are currently under a barrage of malware attacks. Data presented by Atlas VPN reveals that the education industry has been the primary target for cyberattacks in the last 30 days.
Over 80% of malware attacks globally were aimed at companies in the education sector, totaling 5.13 million attacks for the period, which comes out to an average of 171 thousand attacks daily.
The data for the analysis was extracted via Microsoft’s Security Intelligence platform.
One of the reasons why the education industry became the main target is the shift towards digitalization. The pandemic forced e-institutions to employ technologies that enable students to complete the curricula and exams.
In turn, a lot of new companies sprang up as they saw the opportunity in the market.
However, video conferencing programs, e-learning software, and other digital tools expanded the cyberattack surface exponentially.
It is worth noting that the aforementioned attacks are directed toward enterprises, not institutions. In other words, the data provided shows the number of attacks on businesses in the educational sector, not on schools, colleges, and universities.
