Cyber Threat Analysis on Online Learning and Its Mitigation Techniques Amid Covid-19

Abstract

The impact of COVID-19 pandemic affected the whole world leading to threats to the healthcare, economies, governments, and education sectors. During this challenging period, online learning and educational tools such as Zoom, Google Meet, Microsoft Teams, and Cisco Webex gained immense popularity in academic institutions. However, these tools provided vulnerabilities for malicious attackers to exploit these online platforms. That posed a huge cyber threat to the online educational system to continue and survive under such circumstances. The paper aims to explore and analyze the cyber threats to these online learning platforms to understand the security posture and mitigation techniques. The contribution of this paper is threefold: First, we explore the various attacks on online tools such as Zoom, Google Meet, Microsoft Teams, and Cisco Webex and determine how much security and privacy they offer. Secondly, we analyze the encryption's capabilities to assess the level of confidentiality, integrity, and availability they provide to the users and present the results as a table. Finally, we discussed a common vulnerability framework comprising common threats faced by users and the service provider for the mitigation techniques to improve security.