Ten Signs Your Education Institution Needs CIS Benchmarks Cybersecurity
The Research and Education sectors are extremely high achievers—in a dangerous way. Worldwide, they receive the highest volume of cyberattacks. At times, Higher Education has averaged twice as many weekly attacks as other industries, totaling more than 2000 attacks a week. The average cost of one of these breaches is $3.65M.
And the reasons why data breaches, phishing, ransomware, denial of service attacks and even online course invasions and social media defacement are so successful in Higher Ed? Because they work. When hackers have a college or university point blank, the schools will pay big money to get back to business as usual. Worse, breaches don’t just cost money. They cost in trust, reputation, innovation, time and system availability, not to mention putting your school’s misfortune in the mouths of newscasters across the country.
Answer these questions to see if CIS Benchmarks can help you.
Right now, many colleges and universities are looking at implementing CIS Benchmarks, the recognized standard for baseline security in higher education and industry. With FY ‘25 budgeting on the horizon, this is a critical year to commit to higher levels of cybersecurity. It’s a simple matter of how much your institution wants to pay hackers vs. how much they want to protect their data. (Protecting data is much cheaper than a ransom and it has better optics. Just saying.)
See how many of the following questions you can say yes to and learn if you are a good candidate for implementing CIS Benchmarks.
- Do you maintain legacy systems?
Because colleges and universities were early adopters of internet and other technologies, they often rely on legacy systems that were built in less sophisticated times. Hackers look for this because legacy systems are vulnerable to their cutting-edge, continually evolving tactics.
- Are you also an early adopter?
Higher education tends to be open to trying new ways to engage students, conduct research and improve accessibility. These solutions are usually untested and may be open to vulnerabilities. Adding to that, the suggestions vendors often provide to strengthen security around the program frequently go unheeded.
- Do your systems hold personal data?
Of course they do. From full names and birthdays to social security numbers, you have student, faculty, staff, alumni and vendor data that hackers are hungry to steal and exploit. Worse, they can steal it and hold it for ransom. In corporate America, as many as 25% of consumers stop doing business with organizations that have been hacked and more than 2/3 lose trust in the company and change their way of doing business with them.
- Is your cybersecurity budget lacking?
Educational institutions are often forced to work under tight budgets and resources tend to go to the big earners and high-profile initiatives, like athletics and research. This leaves IT teams with few tools and even fewer hands to protect against cyberattack. If you only have enough resources to “check the boxes” on cybersecurity, you may also have a false sense of security in your solution, your scope of cybersecurity may be limited and you probably can’t keep pace with rapidly evolving hacking tools and techniques.
- Do you offer remote learning?
The rapid transition to online learning during COVID created exponentially more doors for hackers to infiltrate. From software programs to enhance learning to unvetted apps downloaded on remote devices, schools unwittingly opened their systems to countless vectors of attack.
- Does your institution conduct research?
Espionage is big among colleges and universities that are centers for research and hold valuable information. While a phishing attack may be opportunistic, an attack your intellectual property is likely to be fully intentional, targeted and over before you know it has even happened.
- Is your IT network decentralized?
Education systems are usually decentralized because it makes sense for Biology and Literature to have distinct systems. They have distinct needs. But this often ends up creating a piecemeal setup with clear vulnerabilities.
- Do you have a .edu email address and website?
Your .edu address is a big bat signal for hackers who like to phish. Higher Ed is notorious for being easy to hack. Worse, high-value .edu email addresses are also often published online, making your leaders easy to find. In addition, bad actors can often get their own .edu address simply by filling out an application on your site. Once they have that email address, they look legit and, depending on how good the phish is, your users are likely fall for the scam. Which is why 90% of academic breaches begin with an email attack.
- Do you have any trouble finding qualified cybersecurity professionals for your team?
There is a severe shortage of qualified cybersecurity professionals and that shortage will last for the foreseeable future. If you are working shorthanded now—and most colleges are stretched thin—that means you don’t have a lot of spare time to implement security protocols. And if you intend to align with CIS Benchmarks, you won’t be able to implement your solution until you either hire additional team members or automate.
- Are parts of your system accessible to students, faculty, suppliers and others?
The more people who have access to your system means more people who can be phished or otherwise used to hack into your system. The worse news here is that 30% of users in the education industry have fallen for phishing scams—double the rate of the population at large!
If you answered yes to seven of the 10 questions asked, it’s time to implement CIS Benchmarks. If you answered yes to all 10, you needed to start yesterday. We get it. CIS Benchmark implementation can feel overwhelming. It’s hard to even know where to start. But as intimidating as CIS Benchmarks may be, their user- and expert-developed benchmarks and controls have been proven to cut off avenues to attack better than anything else. And, trust us, nothing compares to the panic, overwhelm and humiliation CISOs feel in the wake of an attack. Your systems will eventually recover, but will you?
Fortunately, there are automation tools like SteelCloud’s ConfigOS that can help you achieve full CIS Benchmarks compliance, rapidly and with the staff you have on hand. Download our CIS Benchmarks Compliance Success Guide for a holistic look at the challenge. And, when you’re ready to get started, schedule a free demo to see how easily automation can ruin a hacker’s day.
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