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Blog posted by: Nick Wilding – AXELOS, Paul Featherstone – Former CIO, Durham University and Kuldeep Sandhu - Higher and Further Eductation Consultant at Innovative Quality Solutions Ltd, 27 July 2018.

An AXELOS webinar – Protecting the reputation of UK Further and Higher Education with your greatest defence: your people – has highlighted how Further and Higher Education establishments are the ideal target for cyber attackers.

Education institutions hold personal and financial information on staff, academics, alumni and students, as well as intellectual assets such as research projects, intellectual property and data, presents a “sea of riches” to any cyber attacker. A breach of their systems could also damage an establishment’s otherwise excellent and hard won reputation.

While 87% of the top 50 establishments have been the victim of at least one breach, technology alone does not provide the solution when 90% of successful cyber attacks are linked to human error.

So, what can be done? The webinar – now available on demand – examines the threats UK institutions are facing and explores how they can help their staff, academics and students adopt the right cyber resilient behaviours which play such an important role in maintaining a resilient system.

In the webinar, Nick Wilding, AXELOS Cyber Resilience General Manager, Durham University’s former Chief Information Officer, Paul Featherstone and Kuldip Sandhu of IT consultancy Innovative Quality Solutions discuss how ongoing awareness training has a crucial part to play in an effective cyber resilience strategy.

Paul Featherstone qualifies this when he says “people provide a real opportunity to protect information now and in the future. All levels of an educational organization, from council and senate members to staff and students, need to be aware of their responsibilities in stopping potential attacks. Doing this could save a reputation and protect fee income, sponsorships and research partnerships.”

Kuldip Sandhu begins the webinar explaining why the education sector is such a lucrative target explaining that “the education sector contributes £35bn to the overall economy, and a potential attack coming in many forms – from phishing emails, ransomware to Denial of Service – it has never been more important for users to understand their role in keeping a system secure.”

Nick Wilding concludes the webinar outlining how continual, engaging and relevant training will mitigate against cyber threats. Organizations need to adopt and tailor several training approaches including gamification, eLearning, online quizzes and storytelling which help to make the training relevant and memorable.

To listen to their discussion and learn how to develop a training approach to meet the growing cyber challenges, what steps are needed to reduce the attack threat and above all protect data and your Further and Higher Education institution’s reputation, see the webinar page.

What next?

Visit AXELOS.com/resilia-higher-education to request your free copy of our discussion paper ‘Protecting the reputation of UK Higher Education with your greatest defence: your people'.

You can also discover why storytelling is a powerful approach to cyber security and data protection awareness training and listen to our audio story series at AXELOS.com/resilia-power-of-stories.

Make your people your greatest defence with RESILIA® Frontline, a GCHQ Certified Training (GCT) provider of cyber security and data protection awareness training.