Schools are the most common cybercrime targets - ESET

For all of our customer’s networks that we monitor, including school districts, we are constantly seeing malicious bots scanning public-facing systems for vulnerabilities. Public-facing systems are any systems that can be accessed publicly through the internet. The malicious bots are built to report what is vulnerable or automatically exploit these systems, then hand control over to their commander.

Three Major Types of Cybercrime Hitting School Districts are
1. Ransom and Extortion
2. Phishing
3. Cryptomining Malware

In schools specifically, we have recently seen cryptomining malware becoming more common than ransomware by a large margin in a very short period of time. According to Checkpoint, the frenzy of cryptocurrency mining has caused a “frenzy” of this malware to hit the internet in droves. This malware isn’t always as immediately detrimental to a school or business as other types of cyberattacks. Cryptomining malware slows networks down to a crawl and shortens the lifespan of computing systems.

Phishing campaigns often target average employees who have no specialized cybersecurity knowledge and who only use online technology incidentally in the course of their duties. For example, unsolicited emails with infected attachments are often sent to HR departments.

Ransomware is one of the most impactful and widespread threats today. Education has been the number one target of ransomware attacks over the past couple of years. Education accounted for almost 1/4 of all ransomware attacks in 2016 according to a threat report from Kaspersky Security Bulletin. Outpacing every other industry on the planet, it is no secret that ransomware is a threat to education.