Almost half of education institutions see attacks on their cloud infrastructure

A new study reveals that 47 percent of educational institutions have suffered a cyberattack on their cloud infrastructure within the last 12 months.

The research from Netwrix shows that for 27 percent of these incidents in the cloud were associated with unplanned expenses being incurred to fix security gaps.

"Educational institutions are keen to broaden their cloud adoption: The sector expects to have 56 percent of the workload to be in the cloud by the end of 2023, compared to this year's 44 percent," says Dirk Schrader, VP of Security Research at Netwrix. "But without proper visibility into who has access to sensitive data and when and how that data is being used, IT teams will not be able to proactively mitigate data overexposure and spot suspicious behavior in the cloud."

According to the research 83 percent of educational organizations store sensitive data in the cloud. With educators and students constantly sharing this information, there's greater concern about insider threats than in other industries. 48 percent of respondents in this sector consider cybersecurity risks associated with their own employees to be the greatest ones.

"The educational sector has a good reason to be concerned about insider threats since 42 percent of them experienced account compromise attacks in 2022 compared to the average of 31 percent from the other industries surveyed. Accordingly, their IT teams should pay closer attention to identity and access management by implementing a zero standing privilege approach and enforcing strong password policies," adds Schrader.

You can get the full 2022 Cloud Data Security Report from the Netwrix site.

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