Securing Higher Education Against Advanced Cyberthreats
End-to-End Security to Protect Your Data
Securing Higher Education Against Advanced Cyberthreats
Sophos MDR is the leading Managed Detection and Response service for the education sector
Learn how to secure your Education Provider now.
The cybersecurity challenge for higher education providers continues to grow, with 50% experiencing an increase in attack complexity over 2021, while 53% saw an increase in attack volume1.
Read this report to discover:
- The cybersecurity challenges facing the higher education sector today
- How Sophos MDR protects hundreds of higher education providers from cyberthreats that technology alone cannot prevent
- What education providers say about Sophos MDR
Overview:
Higher education providers such as colleges and universities are a prime target for cybercriminals. Adversaries are increasingly attracted by the valuable and sensitive information they hold, and the opportunity to extort payments using ransomware and the threat of breach exposure.
As cyberthreats grow in both volume and complexity, many higher education providers are turning to the Sophos Managed Detection and Response (MDR) service for protection against advanced attacks that technology alone cannot prevent. This solution brief explores the cybersecurity challenges facing the sector and introduces Sophos MDR, the number one MDR service supporting higher education today.
Higher education are a major target for cyberthreats:
64%
hit by ransomware in 2021
53%
report an increase in attack volume
50%
report an increase in attack complexity
50%
report an increase in the impact of cyberattacks
The Cybersecurity Challenge Facing the Higher Education
The impact of advanced cyberthreats on higher education is severe:
A major cyber incident has very considerable financial and operational repercussions for higher education providers. In 2021, the average ransom paid by the sector was a crippling $905,000. While this includes a small number of very large payments, almost one quarter (24%) paid between $50,000 and $100,000. Furthermore, the average overall cost to remediate a ransomware attack came in at $1.42 million, with well over one third (39%) of the encrypted data remaining unrecovered after the incident.
Recovery costs are just part of the story. Nearly all (97%) higher education establishments hit by ransomware said the attack impacted their ability to operate, while 96% of those in the private sector said it caused them to lose business/ revenue. In both cases, these are the highest impact figures reported across all industry sectors. If IT systems go down, providers’ ability to deliver teaching and learning is often severely inhibited, with major repercussions for students and staff.
Sophos MDR: Securing Higher Education
As the cybersecurity challenge continues to grow, higher education providers are increasingly turning to the Sophos MDR service to help them stay ahead of today’s advanced threats.
Sophos Managed Detection and Response (MDR) is a fully managed service delivered by experts who detect and respond to cyberattacks targeting your computers, servers, networks, cloud workloads, email accounts, and more.
Detect: We monitor your environment 24/7, collecting, contextualizing, and correlating security data from the Sophos Adaptive Cybersecurity Ecosystem and your existing cybersecurity investments to identify suspicious activities
Investigate: Expert human operators investigate potential incidents, leveraging our deep financial services sector and threat expertise to hunt for signs of adversarial activities
Remediate: Analysts quickly remediate attacks across the broad range of your environment, before they turn into something more damaging such as ransomware or a wide scale data breach
Review: Comprehensive root cause analysis of incidents together with regular health checks and weekly and monthly reporting enable you to improve security posture and prevent future recurrence
A service designed around you
We understand that each healthcare organization is different with their own existing security investments, IT/cybersecurity staff, and IT environment. Sophos MDR meets you where you are: you choose the level of support required, whether you want us to notify you of threats so your team can take remedial action, contain threats on your behalf, or provide full incident response and root cause analysis. Our security specialists will work with you to identify the right approach for your organization.
With an average time to detect, investigate and remediate of just 38 minutes, Sophos MDR is more than 5 times quicker than even the fastest in-house security operations team.
Elevate your protection using your existing investments
- Endpoint telemetry to spot malicious activities and attack behaviors
- Firewall data to detect intrusion attempts and beaconing
- Network telemetry to identify rogue assets, unprotected devices, and novel attacks
- Email alerts to pinpoint initial entry into the network and attempts to steal access data
- Identity data to detect unauthorized network entry and attempts to escalate privileges
- Cloud alerts to indicate unauthorized network access and efforts to steal data
Sophos MDR
- 24/7 real-time threat monitoring and response
- Expert lead threat hunting
- Cross-product (Sophos and third-party) consolidation and correlation of security event data
- Full-scale managed incident response (unlimited number of hours; no additional fees or retainers)
- Best in class breach protection warranty
- Dedicated incident response lead assigned
- Direct call-in support to Sophos security operations centers (6 global SOCs)
- Weekly and monthly activity reports
- Monthly intelligence briefings
- Root cause analysis performed to improve security posture and prevent recurrence of future threats
- Regular Sophos account health checks to review configurations and ensure optimal performance
"My overall experience with Sophos MDR has been nothing short of spectacular, the service is driven by a team of experts coupled with machine learning technology gives you a complete visibility of your infrastructure. All threats happening across are being monitored and contained remotely by the MDR team." -Gartner Peer Insights
“The quality of the security, which gives us peace of mind knowing that we have a team watching our back and we aren't alone in keeping our business and client data safe.” -Gartner Peer Insights
“Great partnership with Sophos, strongly recommend.” -Gartner Peer Insights
