University of Derby

The UK’s universities are an increasingly attractive target for both financially motivated cybercriminals and nation-state attackers. The former group typically look for personally identifiable information (PII) on staff and students, which they can monetise on the dark web by selling it on to fraudsters. According to university digital service provider, Jisc, phishing/social engineering is the number one threat facing users at UK higher education institutions, followed by ransomware/malware. Universities are also targeted by nation states looking for valuable research and IP – as seen in the attacks linked to Iran revealed last year. Troublingly, recent pen tests from Jisc found that in all of the 50+ universities targeted, ethical hackers were able to obtain “high-value” data within just two hours.

Ransomware is another persistent threat to universities. Research from 2016 revealed that over half of the UK’s higher education institutions had suffered an attack. The University of Derby was not immune to this threat, as its old endpoint security software was unable to detect some ransomware attacks, prompting the institution to a search for a new provider. “Three years ago we had four major incidents where portions of our shared drives had been encrypted, and we had to restore data from back-ups,” explains Luke Williams, senior IT services engineer, University of Derby. “We invested in Trend Micro primarily because of that – in order to find a more effective alternative.”