“While not on the scale of recent megabreaches in the retail or health-care industries, security experts say that the higher education market is facing big challenges when it comes to cybersecurity, leading it to be one of the lowest-performing verticals in the market when it comes to breach protection.”
Higher education is becoming more of a target for hackers and it is becoming tough to combat these attacks due to the budget allocated to the security teams coupled with the information that higher education organization tend to work with (i.e. student information, faculty and student research, intellectual properties, and other sensitive data).
The sort of environment that academia propagates also is not particularity helpful in terms of security. The openness in which higher education organization tends to gravitate towards can in many cases be a hindrance to security. This can be remediated with proper training and dissemination of information.
While the challenges may be increasing, there is no reason why these challenges cannot be properly combated
Source: http://www.crn.com/news/security/300077365/higher-education-faces-growing-security-challenge-with-low-budgets-cultural-barriers.htm?itc=refresh
