A research conducted by a government-funded agency has discovered that students are more responsible for cyber attacks on Universities and Colleges than hacking groups doing the organized crime.
Joint Information Systems Committee (JISC) which conducted the survey by examining around 850 attacks in 2017-18 concluded that most of the incidents were conducted by either staff or students in the said time frame.
“It’s notoriously difficult to identify individual cyber-criminals”, says Dr. John Chapman, the head of security operations, JISC.
But the team led by Chapman discovered that the attacks sharply declined in the month of Christmas, Easter and summer breaks, while surged up during half terms. So, the suspicion grew up on staff and students serving and studying in Universities and colleges.
However, Chapman is sure that 50% of attacks were sophisticated state-sponsored incidents where serious criminal players working for foreign intelligence agencies could have been involved.
JISC survey found that most of the attacks on the networks of educational institutions were of DDOS attack genre where hackers try to target websites with fake traffic to overload and crash the network.
In few of the cases, the security teams analyzed that the attacks began at 9:00 am and finished at 11:30 am and then again started at 13:00 PM to finish at 15:00 or 16:00 PM.
This raised the suspicion that the students or members of staff dealing with computer security could have taken a break time for lunch and the resumed the attacks.
Note- JISC is a UK’s non-profit organization whose role is to support organizations relevant and useful advice on digital resources, networks, and technology services. The agency which is located in Manchester is being funded by the government of the UK along with some higher education bodies and is also found investing its time in developing new technologies.
