According to recent research, educational institutions should double-check their defenses against distributed denial of service attacks, which disrupt operations by overwhelming internet traffic.
There were 140,000 more DDoS attacks per month on average in April than there were in 2021, according to the research. According to a report, DDoS assaults in the education sector increased by more than 370% between January and June of 2021. Administration issued a warning to its readers in October, stating that such attacks were probably only going to get worse. In this article we will discuss about the higher education DDoS attacks, so continue reading.
Who makes DDoS attacks on higher education institutions?
Critical and detailed analysis has revealed that insiders are mostly responsible for significant cyberattacks on higher education institutions websites. This implies that those responsible for these crimes are university employees or even students.
A student who chooses to waste time on the computer instead of studying or writing an essay for an exam, or who occasionally decides to hack the system to protest exams, rebel against the system, or even to obtain exam questions in advance. It can be challenging to accredit cyberattacks, but reports says that this behavior may be a sign that the culprits are either students, staff, or other individuals familiar with the academic calendar.
There are various methods a hacker could employ. To take over the system and impair functionality, the hacker may choose to utilize a command-and-control server or a botnet.
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ONLINE LEARNING RAISES THE SECURITY STAKES FOR HIGHER EDUCATION
The transition to remote learning had a significant impact on how vulnerable institutions were to DDoS attacks. In addition to delivering instruction and exams online, institutions are now more dependent than ever on connection.
Because of this, assaults on videoconferencing and collaboration services like Zoom and Webex started to gain popularity in 2020. It was unusual for that kind of target to take the No. 4 position among the most common targets, according to the research.
The fact that educational institutions now have to incorporate DDoS into their security stacks is highlighted by all of these changes.
According to one research, 83 percent of the businesses hit by a DDoS attack cited overworked firewalls or VPN devices as a cause of the outage, a 21 percent increase from the year before. Attacks also became more sophisticated in 2020, with a sharp increase in the number of multivector attacks.
In order to control these risks, more companies that were affected by DDoS attacks for the first-time last year began to resort to managed security services, particularly in the education and healthcare sectors. Demand for DDoS mitigation services rose by 69 percent for large firms, 50 percent for mid-tier businesses, and 61 percent for small- to medium-sized businesses.
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