Sophos Securing Lower Education Against Advanced Cyberthreats

Overview

Lower education providers (establishments that cater to students below 18 years, including primary, secondary, elementary, high school, and K-12 institutions) are a prime target for cybercriminals. Adversaries are increasingly attracted by the valuable and sensitive information they hold, broad attack surface, and the opportunity to extort payments using ransomware and the threat of breach exposure.

As cyberthreats grow in both volume and complexity, many lower 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 lower education today.

The Cybersecurity Challenge Facing Lower Education

The impact of advanced cyberthreats on Lower education is severe

A major cyber incident has very considerable financial and operational repercussions for lower education providers. In 2021, the average cost to remediate a ransomware attack came in at $1.58 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 (94%) lower education providers hit by ransomware said the attack impacted their ability to operate, while 92% of those in the private sector said it caused them to lose business/revenue. In both cases, these are amongst 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.

Lower education ransomware recovery cost statistics

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

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Securing Lower Education Against Advanced Cyberthreats