The
article, "Cybercriminals Increasingly Attacking University Networks"
by Fahmida Y. Rashid, sheds light on an issue that should concern all college
students. Rashid looks at analysis by ThreatMetrix, a cyber security firm. They
concluded "that cyber-criminals had already infiltrated networks belonging
to major educational institutions including New York University, George Mason
University, Harvard University, Purdue University, and University of California
in Irvine. ThreatMetrix collects millions of pieces of transaction data from
its customer websites every day. This data is used to create rules that will
"automatically reject transactions that don't meet a certain
threshold." When looking at the data from the universities, one trend
noticed that even though transactions came from devices with university IP
addresses, the data indicated the transactions were made from multiple time
zones. This means that cyber criminals were "using a proxy server, a VPN,
or that the network has been compromised." Once compromised, devices and
servers can be used for any number of criminal activities.
A big problem facing universities is the number of devices infected with malware. Often students and faculty are bringing their own infected devices, or not protecting their devices once on a university network, opening them up to attacks. In fact, the BYOD practice has been commonplace at universities for years and is a big reason universities are being attacked at such a high rate. One such attack noted in the article enabled a group of hackers, named Team GhostShell, to "steal personal records of students, faculty, and staff from 53 universities around the world." The hackers proceeded to release the data to Pastebin, where it was free for anyone to grab. This type of attack can compromise social network accounts, email accounts, and countless other accounts users want to keep private. Again, this shows just how important it is to educate people about protecting their data in a connected world.
A big problem facing universities is the number of devices infected with malware. Often students and faculty are bringing their own infected devices, or not protecting their devices once on a university network, opening them up to attacks. In fact, the BYOD practice has been commonplace at universities for years and is a big reason universities are being attacked at such a high rate. One such attack noted in the article enabled a group of hackers, named Team GhostShell, to "steal personal records of students, faculty, and staff from 53 universities around the world." The hackers proceeded to release the data to Pastebin, where it was free for anyone to grab. This type of attack can compromise social network accounts, email accounts, and countless other accounts users want to keep private. Again, this shows just how important it is to educate people about protecting their data in a connected world.
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