FE Education Analysis: As UK educational institutes face higher cyber security threats, where does India stand?

Educational institutions in the United Kingdom (UK) face higher cybersecurity threats than businesses, with as many as 85% of institutes at risk in comparison to 32% businesses, a government report released in April 2023, revealed. 

The average UK university has just 3.5 cybersecurity employees while around 10% have no dedicated internal staff at all, an analysis by London-based cyber risk management firm, Darkbeam claimed. The dark web monitoring platform further claimed to have identified several data breaches from educational institutions in April. 

According to Darkbeam, data related to individual schools, groups of schools and outsourced service providers – including a mental health support organisation to American school systems where personally identifiable information was made available on the dark web.

In an analysis of 30 organisations which were awarded contracts worth more than £100,000 by British universities in April 2023, the company found that 23 had experienced email credential breaches and three were involved in recent data breaches or cybersecurity incidents. 

Despite the scale of this threat, only around half of the educational institutes in the UK have a cybersecurity strategy in place majorly due to lack of resources to formulate and implement such a programme. 

Cybersecurity Threats In India

In India as well, cybersecurity crimes remain a major concern. The country topped the number of cyberattacks in the education sector in 2022, according to a report by Singapore based digital risk management enterprise, CloudSEK. Furthermore, India failed in the cybersecurity literacy test with just 51.2 points out of 100, a 2021 report by NordVPN revealed. This is 14 points below the global average, as per the report. 

Also Read: How Indian higher education degrees are recognised abroad and why engineering, medicine still lag behind?

Experts believe that there is a widespread need to include cybersecurity in the curriculum of students across schools and colleges. With the increasing popularity of generative Artificial Intelligence (AI), the cybersecurity threats are expected to increase further. Both University Grants Commission (UGC) and All India Council for Technical Education (AICTE) have issued strategies for Higher Education Institutes (HEIs) in the country to set up a strengthened ecosystem against cyberattacks.   

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