With US Colleges Re-Starting Session, Cyber-Criminals Once Again Get Active; BitSight

BitSight Technologies the security rankings issuer has just published a report that claims online criminals are returning with their malicious activities when college students in USA prepare to attend classes, reported nbcnews.com, August 21, 2014.

Evidently, institutions of higher learning go through a wave of sinister cyber-assaults throughout the academic period.

However, the worst thing observed is that the majority universities don't have proper equipments for stopping or dealing with such assaults that as per the report, leads to their rankings within cyber-security lower than those of healthcare as well as retail, the twin segments that experience almost constant security assaults with frequent successful hacks.

Most assaults that colleges and universities encounter result from malware contaminations. Recalling attacks by a Trojan virus that compromised Apple PCs while seized sensitive private data through masking of the malware like some browser plug-in, a similarity can be noticed with colleges getting targeted with mostly such Trojan-like malicious programs.

Other most common malicious software discovered on university or college computers are Adware -malware which attacks end-users via online ads. Conficker is yet another stubborn malware, a kind of PC-worm which compromises Windows OS of Microsoft.

The report indicates that universities become so frequent targets of cyber-assaults since they possess an enormous repository of personal as well as other personal information that include from Social Security Numbers and addresses to intellectual property and credit card details. Accordingly, hackers who fast discern the feeble IT systems the institutions maintain for data protection, exploit the situation.

As per CTO and Founder Stephen Boyer of BitSight Technologies, institutions of higher learning frequently and without difficulty get targeted with malicious software as students lack essential central security arrangement similar as within the corporate. SCMagazine.com published this, August 21, 2014.

Boyer explains the above means probable risk to pupils' data followed with intellectual property too, stored inside computers, which could have vital research material.

He adds that schools, nevertheless, ranked top for security, employed an information security director or CISO. Moreover, even though the complete sector of education is not doing well, evidences do arise of educational institutions which are indeed prospering, he concludes.

» SPAMfighter News - 8/30/2014