Project 1 Current Security Threats
There are many security threats to all businesses public and private. I have narrowed them down to three of the top threats today that could affect AIM Higher College. The first and in my opinion is the most important is students/staff bringing their own devices (BYOD) on campus. There are many risks with this including installation of malicious apps, losing the device with stored credentials, sharing of devices, hacking from the outside, and click first read later. An unsecured device could literally hand the keys to the castle over to a criminal – Like a usb drive that has software on it to monitor keystrokes etc.
My number two is Data privacy in the cloud. There are many benefits to move data to the cloud including the cost and efficiency of it. But it also opens the organization to new threats like data breaches, data loss, account or service traffic hijacking, insecure API’s, and denial of service attacks. All of these would have huge ramifications on the school. Data breaches could possibly give vital information on students and staff that could adversely affect their lives and the colleges.
My last threat is Ransomware. We have seen a huge uptick in Ransomware over the last couple years and they seem to become better with each variant. Ransomware locks your screen and encrypt your file in attempt to extort money to get the encryption key. Although some people have paid and were able to un-encrypt their files it is not 100% guaranteed to work. If Ransomware were to be loaded to a system server containing file shares it could be devastating especially if there hasn’t been a backup recently.