Netwrix, a cybersecurity
vendor that makes data security easy, today announced additional findings from its
2020 Data Risk & Security Report. The report reveals
that many educational organizations are at risk of data security incidents
during the current period of working from home and virtual learning.
According to the survey,
even before the COVID-19 pandemic, the majority of educational organizations
had weak data security controls. In particular, 54% of IT professionals in the
educational sector confessed that employees put data at risk by sharing it via
cloud apps outside of IT knowledge. This is the highest percentage among all
verticals surveyed. The move to distance learning increases this risk even
more.
Other notable findings
of the report include:
- 82% of educational organizations don't
track data sharing at all or do it manually, and 50% of them suffered a
data breach due to unauthorized data sharing last year.
- 63% of educational organizations don't
review permissions regularly, and 24% of system administrators admitted to
granting direct access rights upon user request.
- 28% of respondents discovered data outside
of secure locations, which is the highest number of all industries
surveyed. This data was left exposed for days (40%) or months (33%).
- Only 8% of respondents have developed
cybersecurity and risk KPIs to evaluate their security posture and track
success.
"Distance learning
creates many challenges for educational organizations, and cybersecurity is
often taking a back seat to operational resilience. The Netwrix survey shows
that security processes were not ideal before the pandemic, leaving these
institutions even more vulnerable to the growing number of cyber threats today.
To ensure these institutions can secure their student and employee data, IT
professionals need to get back to basics. First, they need to understand what
sensitive data they have, and classify it by its level of sensitivity and value
to the organization. Second, they need to ensure that the data is stored
securely, prioritizing the most important data. And last, they need to adopt
healthy security practices for granting permissions in order to avoid data
overexposure," said Steve Dickson, CEO at Netwrix.
To get the complete
findings of the 2020 Netwrix Data Risk & Security Report, please visit: https://www.netwrix.com/2020datariskandsecurityreport.html