The cybercriminal community doesn’t hold back from attacking institutions which are there to protect and support our society – and attacks on schools are sadly becoming commonplace. Last year, research from McAfee found that that the education sector experienced a 1,114 percent increase in cloud threats between January and April due to the pandemic.

It’s vital that the education sector takes a proactive approach to security. Moving forwards, schools can adopt threat intelligence technology that learns from previous breaches to help prioritise threats, predict the types of campaigns that will be launched against them, and pre-emptively improve their defensive countermeasures. There is also industry-specific intelligence available to help organisations understand and improve threat posture against targeted attacks or sector-based campaigns.

Schools can also improve protection against cyber attacks by building an open, flexible architecture that can adapt as needed without the need for bolt-on security, as well as adopting a Zero Trust mindset that can help them to maintain control over access to the network and all instances within it. Ultimately, the industry must use this as a lesson and understand that cybersecurity needs to be considered an investment rather than a cost – as protection is more important than ever.