Does Cyber-Security require for Educational Institutes, Healthcare, and other sectors?

People often think that their respective fields (apart from IT sectors) do not require cyber-security. But this is a very wrong perspective. So today let’s understand why the Educational Institutes & healthcare sector requires cyber-security. As we all know DATA is new Gold. So irrespective of any field Data needs to be protected.

Healthcare sector

BlueVoyant Report stats that “attacks on the pharmaceutical industry has increased by 50% between 2019 & 2020”.

Each year billions of dollars are earned by the pharmaceutical industry. Nowadays healthcare sectors are trusting technology more & more to manage many things. Same time healthcare sectors are having so much sensitive and private information like Patients' medical records, financial data, employee information, and research data. So all these things attract cybercriminals.

Data Breach in the healthcare industry cost(average) $7.3 million and that is 84% higher than other all sectors.

Let’s first see recent cyberattacks on healthcare-related sectors.

• ExecuPharm suffers a ransomware attack in March 2020. (social security numbers, taxpayer IDs, driver’s license numbers, passport numbers, bank account details, credit card numbers, NI numbers, and beneficiary information was stolen by attackers)
• Mumbai-based Pharmaceutical firm Lupin was hit by a cyberattack that affected some of its IT systems (7 November 2020)
• Dr Reddy’s Laboratories were targeted by a ransomware attack. (22 October 2020)
• In the year 2019 “Swiss drugmaker ‘Roche’ become a victim of a cyber attack”.

This list can go on and on.

According to the report, 68% of pharmaceutical executives’ emails have been exposed in a data breach over the past five to 10 years. Of those exposed, the hacked passwords have been viewable on the dark web for 57% of these executives with exposure. (Reference: biospace.com )

So Now let’s talk about Educational institutes.

Educational Institutes

Why Cyber Security is required for Educational Institutes!

“Check Point says the majority of the U.S. increase is due to DDoS attacks. One such attack led Miami-Dade County Public Schools in Florida to cancel online classes for 200,000 students on Sept. 2” ( More Info )

Educational institutes save data of students and staff’s personal information and due to this COVID-19 pandemic, most of the schools and colleges function online. So nowadays Malicious Actors and Hackers target schools & colleges. Pennsylvania State University’s engineering school was targeted by Malicious Actors in past (May-2015).

Security challenges are overlooked by many of the educational institutes. As we know Educational Institutes have personal information about students and staff also they have Financial data, Personally identifiable information, educational data.

Reasons why the educational institute is easily compromised.

Resources:

Most of the educational institutes do not have the budget for security. In general, we can say in most of the institutes we will not find even a single person who is dedicated to security. ( lack of staff and software)

Cultural issues:

In educational institutions, staff needs to bring their own digital devices so this can be lead to security issues.

Policies:

Most of the institutes have build policies for using the network but a very small number of people from institutes know all the policies and follow them.

How to defend against cyberattacks.

• The first and most important step is to identify valuable IT assets and secure them.
• Institutes should conduct cyber awareness workshops for employees.
• Strong Access controls should be placed.
• Make sure that all the systems on the premises should be well updated.
• Make sure to use updated anti-virus software.
• should have a reliable backup of data.
• Ensure strong password protection for all devices

Conclusion

In general, we can say all the sectors ( whether it’s related to IT sectors or Non-IT sectors) that collects and stores data needs to protect them from malicious actors/hackers. So they can include endpoint security solutions, firewalls, intrusion detection systems, or intrusion prevention systems on their premises and they need to do auditing and penetration testing (pen-testing) of all the security solutions they installed. so they can defend against cyberattacks.