Network Security Threats to Higher Education Institutions

Abstract

The Covid-19 pandemic has significantly changed the way higher education institutions (HEIs) operate around the world. Distance learning has become the unique opportunity that the process further education in conditions where most economic activities were put on hold. To ensure the quality of distance learning have been implemented and used extensively online learning platforms, applications, video conferencing and cloud computing facilities in HEIs. However, this has increased the threats to information security, so that in 2020, in the field of education in general, and HEIs in particular, the number of cyber-attacks has increased, which has led to significant financial losses but also to activity interruption and theft of personal data or intellectual property. In order to identify the biggest threats of the 2020 year, for HEIs, several security reports and scientific articles related to the studied field were analyzed, in order to identify the most common security threats. As a result, of the research conducted, the top Cyber threats of HEIs are: malware attacks, DoS / DDos attacks and phishing attacks. Securing university networks in 2020 was a challenge for specialists in this field.