Check Point Research (CPR) recently published its Cyber Attack Trends: 2022 Mid-Year Report which reported that similar to 2021’s top industry ranking, the first half of 2022 displays significant rises in attacks across all sectors.
Topping them all, Education and Research still leads as the most targeted industry, with an average of 2,297 attacks against organisations every week in the 1H of 2022, showing a 44 percent increase compared to the 1H of 2021. In today’s report, we shed some more insights to that sector, and present indepth though alarming numbers.
In July 2022, the Education/Research sector shows more than double the number of weekly cyber-attacks compared to the other industries’ average. This sector had an average of almost 2,000 attacks per organisation every week (a six percent increase compared to July last year and 114 percent increase compared to July two years ago). Such attacks can have devastating consequences like the case of Lincoln College, which after suffering a ransomware attack was the final straw that contributed to their decision to shut down on May 13 2022, after 157 years.
When we break down the numbers to education attacks by region in July 2022, we see that ANZ was the most heavily attacked region with 4,176 attacks per organisation every week (seven percent decrease compared to July 2022), followed by Asia with 4,171 attacks (five percentincrease), and Europe with 1,861 attacks (six percent decrease).
Latin America has seen the largest increase in weekly cyberattacks with a 62 percent increase compared to July 2021.
Omer Dembinsky, Data Group Manager at Check Point Software said “Students, parents and schools are tempting targets for hackers, mainly because of data. There’s lots of it. From gradebooks to online assignments, hackers have far more access points to sensitive information and data. Data is leverage for hackers and can be used to orchestrate ransomware attacks. The COVID-19 pandemic forced a big shift to remote learning. However, the shift to remote learning has increased the potential attack surface of hackers significantly. In other words, the door is much wider for hackers to infiltrate school computer networks. All it takes is for one teacher, student, or parent to click on a phishing email created by a cyber criminal and a ransomware attack could be underway. Education and Research is by far the most attacked industry sector, seeing a 114 percent increase in the past two years.”
