Fortinet Securing the New Norm in Education

Anjie lou delos Reyes
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Among the changes brought by the consequences of the coronavirus pandemic is how educational institutions around the world -- including primary and secondary schools as well as colleges and universities. It is now estimated that 70% of students are using online learning in the course of the COVID-19.

Fortinet Securing the New Norm in Education
Fortinet Securing the New Norm in Education

While the readiness of schools around the world for e-learning varies, an important thing to consider is how are their stakeholders and constituents like teachers and students will all get access to online education tools, and how are they going to do it securely?

The move to adapt distance learning is something that can be advantageous to cybercriminals. In fact, according to the 2019 Verizon Data Breach Report, education continues to be plagued by human errors, social engineering, and denial of service attacks. And these changes only compound these challenges.

See Also: Yedpay Deploys Fortinet Security Fabric

Digital solutions and security provider Fortinet addresses this with some suggestions for educational institutions embracing the digital transformation:

Provide Strong Authentication.
It’s a must to enforce strong password policies, including complexity, length, and expiration, and to activate account lockout after failed attempts of password guessing. Multi-factor authentication must also be strictly applied to prevent access thru stolen passwords.

Protect Web Applications
Vulnerable applications are among the easy gateway for cyber attacks. Among the important things to do to address this is by deploying a web application firewall to protect web application servers and the infrastructure from attacks and breaches originating from the Internet and external networks.

Utilize Network Segmentation
Secure your environment by segmenting internet-facing teaching applications from your other internal applications, such as your HR system. With this, the impact will be contained in case there’s a breach.

Manage Third-Party Risk.
The third-party technologies that you use in your online learning environments can pose additional vulnerabilities and risks to your enterprise network. Ensure you perform a thorough security assessment of the vendor and their products before introducing them into your network environment.

Monitor for Unusual Activities.
Distant learning might bring a significant increase in devices and external network traffic. The security staff of an institution should be able to track and monitor login attempts, unexplainable large data transfers, and other unusual activities.

Of course, other than securing the system, it’s also needed to inform teachers and students about security measures online. Fortinet advises for them to be informed about protecting their passwords, updating their devices, and be wary about common types of cyber threats.

The new norm is inevitable, thus, people should be knowledgeable about how to also practice responsible cyber distancing.

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