Email Protection for the Education Sector
Geraldine Hunt
Since COVID-19, schools and universities have continued to embrace eLearning. Around 70% of K-12 students have access to digital tools for online learning. Email is commonly used across schools and universities as a digital communication channel between staff, students, and parents. This is despite the use of other platforms like learning management systems (LMS) and instant messaging platforms. The continued popularity of email in an educational setting makes it an attractive way to initiate a cyberattack.
Why are Educational Institutions at Risk from Cyber Security Threats?
Schools and colleges are often constrained by tight budgets, with spending on students and teaching prioritized. As a result, many institutions simply do not have sufficient security tools in place to stop email threats, and their networks are easy to penetrate. There can also be a lack of awareness about security threats among both staff and students.
Cyberattacks are a lucrative business for hackers, and educational establishments are particularly enticing targets. The contact email addresses of faculty and teaching staff are freely available online, allowing attackers to target and compromise them.
The wealth of sensitive information exchanged through email on a daily basis makes education an even more attractive target. This can range from financial reports to personal student data; this rich data is of extreme value to cybercriminals.
So, what are the main steps educational institutions need to take to tackle security risks? First, let's look more in-depth at the email-borne threats facing education.
Phishing Attacks and Spam
Phishing attacks involve cybercriminals sending emails inviting users to click on an infected link or attachment. If the victim clicks on a malicious phishing link, they will be taken to a spoof webpage. These phishing websites look like well-known brands, including LMS and M365 login pages. Once on the page, the victim will be unaware they are working with a phishing site. The site will require them to submit login credentials, which the cybercriminals behind the scam will steal. Some phishing sites will be designed to steal financial details, for example, from students during the inauguration.
Phishing scammers often impersonate known and trusted services, like the IRS or the United States Citizenship and Immigration Services (USCIS), the latter targeting overseas students. A common type of phishing attack aimed at the education sector is emails offering free grants to students and requesting their bank details and login details to be submitted to avail of the offer. Falling victim to such attacks can potentially cost staff and students thousands.
Spam, often thought of as innocuous, can contain inappropriate or offensive subject matter. Spam can also be a prelude to more dangerous phishing attempts. Spam is dangerous and must be prevented alongside phishing attempts.
Phishing emails can be challenging to detect. Increasingly, phishing campaigns use generative AI to create highly believable emails.
Did You Know?
cyber attacks begin with phishing
to seamlessly install PhishTitan
estimated global cybercrime cost
of K-12 students have access to digital tools for online learning
Malware/Ransomware
Emails that contain attachments or links to malware are another significant security threat. Some links in phishing emails may contain a link that, when accessed, activates a ransomware attack. The malicious software rapidly spreads throughout the college or school network, encrypting files and other data and often exfiltrating the data before encryption occurs. The stolen data and general chaos caused by the disruption of being unable to access the network are used to leverage a ransom.
As well as the financial implications associated with falling victim to such an attack, it can also lead to key academic reports and publications being lost if not backed up properly. Schools and universities hit by ransomware have had to close while they respond to the incident. This happened to Highline Public Schools in the Seattle area. The school district serves more than 17,000 students. All schools in the district were closed during a ransomware attack.
Malware attacks are often highly sophisticated and carefully designed. This means that traditional email filters (often built into email servers) don't readily identify them as harmful and pass the emails through the server undetected.
Outbound Email Threats
While the threats associated with inbound email are well recognized and documented, educational institutions must also be aware of the risks associated with infected outbound emails.
By gaining access to staff and student email accounts, cybercriminals can subsequently send hundreds of spam and phishing emails from compromised accounts, targeting other users within the institution. A single compromised email account can offer access to a wealth of sensitive information throughout the institution.
If an email account associated with a college or school is flagged as sending spam or suspected of being a phishing email, the school/college IP address may be blocklisted, leading to all emails leaving the institution being classified as spam. This, in turn, causes huge communication issues for staff and students, with emails failing to deliver.
Case Study: Harrisonburg Public Schools District
Harrisonburg City Public Schools was the victim of a phishing campaign that emulated communications between students and teachers. The email message claimed to be from a student's parent, but it was actually a phishing email with an attachment file containing a malicious macro.
The email was carefully crafted to create a sense of concern and urgency. It told the teacher that previous messages "failed to deliver the student assignment." The teacher was manipulated into opening the attachment.
Researchers believe the attackers harvested targeted teacher email addresses using faculty contact lists on the school website. Because these pages include the teacher's name, the attacker could personalize the email, making it seem legitimate. The macro downloaded the ransomware executable files once the teacher opened the attached file. The malicious executables were configured to send an SMS message to the attacker, alerting them to a new victim.
The ransomware targeted individuals and not businesses. Enterprise-level attacks demand tens of thousands of dollars, forcing the business to pay the ransom or lose access to critical data. In this case, the ransomware targeted individual teachers, asking for $80 in Bitcoin, making it affordable so that individuals could pay the ransom instead of recovering from backups. However, in many cases of ransomware, schools and universities pay enterprise-level ransoms.
How the Education Sector Can Defend Against Email Threats
Using advanced AI-enabled email protection, schools and universities can defend themselves and their students from email-borne attacks. Email attackers use sophisticated methods to circumvent conventional email security gateways often built into web servers and other platforms, like M365. AI-enabled email security protection uses layers of analysis and machine learning (ML) models to detect phishing emails. The machine learning is trained on real threat data, allowing it to recognize patterns that signal phishing attacks.
Email Security for Educational Institutions
Email Protection Solutions like SpamTitan enable educational institutions to detect and stop threats at the source before they can reach their servers.
What is SpamTitan for Education?
SpamTitan is a cloud-based solution that requires no hardware or software. It is extremely intuitive and easy to set up, offering real-time detection for threat analysis, using dual antivirus engines to provide signature-based protection against 100% known malware.
Our advanced threat protection and sandboxing services allow in-depth analysis of suspicious attachments to identify zero-day malware threats. SpamTitan also offers complete outbound email protection, ensuring no malicious or spam emails ever leave your institution, protecting your users and your credibility.
Even if you experience an outage, SpamTitan is always working in the background, ensuring staff and students are not disrupted from their operations.
SpamTitan has received a 100% phishing, malware, and spam catch rate and a perfect 0% false positive rate from tests by Virus Bulletin.
Why not try our SpamTitan email protection solution for free to see for yourself? Sign up today!
Geraldine Hunt
- EMAIL PROTECTION
- EDUCATION
- SCHOOLS
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