The Surprisingly High Cost of Malware in Schools — And How to Stop It

Compared to banks and enterprise corporations and government agencies, who would think that schools would be prime targets for cyberattacks?

Surprisingly, education is actually the industry most at risk of ransomware attacks, with 13 percent of education organizations falling victim.[1] One reason for this is the disproportionately high cost of recovering from a data breach in education, where valuable and highly regulated student information yields an average recovery cost of $200 per record – 42 percent above average.[2]

The rise of digital learning and digital campus innovations is helping students to learn without limits. However, adding new technologies to your environment may also expose vulnerabilities in your attack surface if there are gaps in your security approach.

With the high cost of student data, the value of intellectual property, and the trust of the community at stake, schools and universities need to protect themselves. They need to be able to block malware before it impacts students, to provide secure access to learning resources for everyone on and off campus, and to work with existing tools to extend protection and respond to threats.

Watch our new video below to learn about one way that hackers can attempt to compromise your network and how Cisco’s simple, open, automated, and secure solutions help mitigate threats and enable secure education transformation.

Want to learn more about cybersecurity for education? Check out our solutions.

[1] The Rising Face of Cyber Crime: Ransomware, Bitsight, 2016, https://info.bitsighttech.com/bitsight-insights-ransomware

[2] 2017 Cost of Data Breach Study, Ponemon Institute, June 2017, https://www.ibm.com/security/data-breach