With attacks more prevalent and recovery costs soaring, don’t expose your institution to unnecessary risk—secure assets with a proactive strategy.
Did you know roughly 66% of higher education institutions experienced ransomware attacks in 2024? For context, that’s seven percent higher than the global cross-sector average (59%). And it gets worse: affected institutions spent about $4.02 million on recovery initiatives, or four times the year prior.
Universities remain prime targets for ransomware, phishing, data breaches, and other attacks. One is their high-value data assets. As you can imagine, research from cutting-edge AI, medicine, engineering, and other university projects is highly lucrative for criminal and nation-state actors. Students’ financial and medical information are similarly targeted, as a single record can fetch upwards of $200 on the dark web.
Beyond direct financial incentives, weak defenses, structural vulnerabilities, and low cybersecurity funding also play a role. Many institutions today run fragmented legacy IT systems on open, unsecured networks, meaning hackers can access their entire ecosystem with just one successful attack. The lack of an updated security program and skilled team further exacerbates risks.
How can higher education institutions build resilience? This article covers all you need to know. Keep reading.
Key Cybersecurity Challenges Facing Higher Education
Before delving into cybersecurity best practices, let’s first review the challenges your institution faces:
1. Protecting Vast Amounts of Sensitive Data
Your institution likely handles massive amounts of data, including personally identifiable information (PII), financial records, and valuable intellectual property. This creates two problems: Besides making you a top target for cybercriminals, maintaining comprehensive oversight and protection is tricky because the data is diverse and constantly changing as students enroll, graduate, and move through the system.
2. Managing Security Across Distributed Networks and Hybrid Learning Environments
The shift towards hybrid learning environments has expanded your attack surface significantly. Not only must you secure the smartboards, cameras, research equipment, and other IoT devices connected to your network, but the devices used by students and faculty to access your distributed campus networks from dorms, coffee shops, cyber cafes, and even different geographies. Securing all these endpoints can be a nightmare without the right strategy and tools.
3. Balancing Accessibility with Security Controls
The wide range of users—students, faculty, staff, and external partners—also makes managing access to sensitive data difficult. On the one hand, you must establish robust controls to keep unauthorized individuals out. Yet, these measures must not be too strict to create friction in the user experience. Achieving this much-needed balance between accessibility and security can be elusive for some.
How To Build Resilient Campuses
Here are some practical tips to win the cyber war:
1. Implement End-to-End Security Solutions
The most effective defense against today’s sophisticated cybercriminals is consolidating your network, cloud, and endpoint security. With these solutions working as a unified system, your institution can scale and adapt to faculty and student needs without compromises. Managing network segmentation, access controls, upgrades, and ensuring consistent data protection is more straightforward. At the same time, expanding the network perimeter to include new services, applications, platforms, and devices—including those in the operational technology realm, like door alarms and security cameras—is more efficient.
2. Leverage Real-Time Threat Detection and Response Systems
Continuous monitoring of your IT estate helps detect and respond to threats early, ensuring minimum damage and downtime. One way to achieve this is with advanced artificial intelligence (AI) tools analyzing your network traffic in real-time, flagging suspicious activity (e.g., unauthorized access attempts), and automatically triggering countermeasures as soon as threats are detected.
3. Deploy Multi-Factor Authentication (MFA) and Encryption Protocols
Applying MFA consistently across all systems, including cloud services, internal networks, and mobile applications, adds a layer of security to assets. With users required to verify their identity through multiple steps every time they log in from an unknown location or device, the risk of unauthorized access is considerably minimized.
Implementing standard encryption protocols throughout your data’s lifecycle can further fortify defenses by ensuring it remains unreadable and practically useless to hackers without the relevant decryption keys.
4. Conduct Regular Cybersecurity Training for Staff and Students
Verizon’s 2024 Data Breach Report linked 68% security breaches involved human-related factors. This highlights a compelling reality—even with robust security tools, nefarious actors can still compromise your organization by targeting unwitting end users through phishing and other social engineering tactics.
Regular staff and student training is critical to raise awareness about cybersecurity best practices and ensure nobody is clicking on something they shouldn’t or taking an otherwise misguided step that could jeopardize your networks, systems, or data.
Let NRI Help Elevate Your Security Posture
As higher education institutions face an escalating cyberwar, building resilience is essential to secure the future. This is no easy task. Luckily, NRI has been there and done exactly that.
Our security advisory team can help review your current security posture using established industry frameworks to identify gaps and determine what is needed to reach the desired future state.
With a comprehensive risk assessment and strategic roadmap tailored to your institution’s needs, our operations team will build, implement, and integrate reliable solutions to address your unique risks and goals. These include:
- Identity and access controls ensure authorized access to critical assets while blocking unauthorized users.
- Continuous protection with endpoint security, device management, and XDR solutions across all devices.
- Secure cloud and on-premise workloads with robust network and cloud security measures.
- Regular system testing simulates real attacks to identify and fix vulnerabilities quickly.
- Incident response support, including backups and redundancies, minimizes disruption during security events.
So now, with a custom security solution updated for modern threats and managed by a trusted partner, staff, students, and other stakeholders can safely focus on key education priorities.
Contact us now to learn how to establish the high-level security your institution deserves.
