Organizations in the education sector around the world have been bombarded with 2,507 attempted cyberattacks per week between April and June, making it the third most frequently targeted industry during the second quarter, according to SiliconAngle.
Malicious QR code messages have also been increasingly leveraged to compromise the sector, with Office 365 used to send over 15,000 of such messages to education entities, a Microsoft Threat Intelligence report showed. Attacks were also particularly focused on universities and colleges, with state-sponsored threat groups targeting their systems to exfiltrate intellectual property and research data, particularly about artificial intelligence research and development, said researchers, who also attributed elevated compromise risk in universities to increased collaboration between students, researchers, and professors. Such findings should prompt the immediate implementation of multi-factor authentication and more robust endpoint security systems, as well as an increased focus on security hygiene, researchers added.
