Dive Brief:
- The Verge reports on the discovery of a potential widespread hacking incident in which several college and university foundation websites were breached and rewritten to promote links for online gambling.
- 76 sites were discovered to have potentially hacked pages, with many still posting the links from the probable breaches.
- According to the report, several schools running sites on common blogging software are vulnerable to online attacks and link placements, which give hackers lucrative returns on clicks before being discovered.
Dive Insight:
Many colleges and universities run their primary and auxiliary websites on popular content management systems like Wordpress, Drupal and other platforms that are very user-friendly. But given the increases in online data breaches at large companies like Yahoo!, colleges and universities without strong IT support systems are at specific risk.
New York University found recently that 3D printing presents unique challenges for IT security, and campuses are among the largest and most vulnerable network security risks because of the number of users they allow and the information they store. Executives will have to plan for addressing breaches and monitoring activity which may indicate cyber attacks on internal exposure to improper or overage in network use.