Another school year is starting up and security firm WatchGuard has a list of the top threat to school IT systems as classes start-up again.  Eric Aarrestad, Vice President at privately held WatchGuard Technologies says, ”With so much at risk and so much to gain by cybercriminals, today’s campus is one of the most dangerous IT environments around.” He continues, “Unlike enterprise organizations that can throw substantial resources towards network and data protection, schools and universities are more constrained, yet they face some of the most demanding security challenges due to the dynamic interaction between students and their school’s IT resources.”

WatchGuard’s top threats include:

Social Networks The security firm calls social networks, the number one threat to school and university networks is social networks, such as Facebook and MySpace. Unfortunately, social networks act as an ideal platform to launch a myriad of attacks against students and departments, including spam, viruses, malware, phishing and more. Adding to this, socially engineered attacks are often extremely successful due to the “trusted” environment that social networks create.

Malware As students and teachers use the web for education purposes, the Seattle-based firm company says many unwittingly expose themselves to drive-by downloads or corrupted websites, which inject malicious forms of software on their computers. Once infected, they risk becoming victims of identity theft or loss of personal information via spyware and keyloggers.

Viruses Today, email remains one of the primary ways for delivering viruses. According to the release, recent surveys suggest that 27 percent of users fail to keep their antivirus signatures which may, in any case, be unable to up stop the new generation of viruses with polymorphic properties.

Botnets The privately held security firm estimates that 15 to 20 percent of all school and university computers connected to the Internet may be part of a botnet. As part of a botnet, school and university systems may be used in a variety of unknown exploits, including spam delivery, denial of service attacks, click-fraud, identity theft and more.

Phishing Phishing scams continue to get more sophisticated and selective, with students being specifically targeted. WatchGuard claims that phishing attacks via social networks achieve a success rate of over 70 percent.

Hacking In a recent survey of education IT professionals, 23 percent ranked student hackers as one of their greatest threats to network security.

Access Control Usage of mobile devices and wireless access to education IT resources continues to plague network administrators. As use of mobile devices escalates, schools will face increasing challenges in managing authorized network access according to the security vendor.

WatchGuard Technologies provides a variety of Internet security software and hardware products, including firewalls, virtual private network (VPN) appliances, and anti-virus applications under the XTM, XCS, and e-Series brands.

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