A quick, free way for educational organisations to block ransomware attacks during the holiday season | #hacking | #cybersecurity | #infosec | #comptia | #pentest | #ransomware

The NCSC, JISC , and JANET have warned the UK education sector to bolster security over the holiday season, when security personnel are distracted and students are heading home. This concern comes when the UK education sector already is in the midst of a cyber crisis, fueled by rampant ransomware attacks. 


Many educational establishments struggle with the dichotomy that exists between security and their core mission of information sharing, thereby balancing the ease of work practices against the needs of the organisation to drive collaboration and syndication around protected, secure data. A perfect storm of strained funding, limited human resources and skills, and ineffective security tooling for securing vulnerable networks makes the education sector an easy target for nefarious threat actors.


In fact, a UK education establishment is 13x more likely to be breached than a UK enterprise business. UK education at the secondary and university levels are being targeted, with impacts causing financial loss across the board. In the university sector, reputation and competitive advantage are also at risk.


It’s abundantly clear that a change in the way we secure the sector is needed. Why are we still being reactive when a proactive security posture that’s easy to implement is possible — not to mention that it’s free right now for 14 days? 


A quick lesson on cyber attack infrastructure


There is a way to get ahead of the attackers. From data breaches to ransomware, all cyber attacks start with a threat actor first setting up the infrastructure, which enables them to establish and maintain a foothold in the victim’s organisation, conduct command-and-control (C2) communications, and drop malware payloads onto a system. 


An attacker’s infrastructure can include many components, including redirectors or even phishing landing pages, ..

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