2017 Last year’s Higher Education cyber attacks lessons: sabotage

Data breaches on university still happened in 2017 and to the total number of attacks grew to 393 (as you remember it was only 5 attacks in 2012) but apart from typical attacks targeting SSN, at this point, DoS attacks started to gather pace. 

So, the next attack that we would like to mention doesn’t look typical in comparison to the listed above, still, it deserves your attention. One of the most unusual sabotage attacks was performed on the American university’s network. As the result of a cyber-attack, some 5,000 internet-connected objects, including vending machines and even lampposts, started to search for seafood. The situation caused almost the total internet connection service interruption over the university. The malefactor applied some Internet of Things malware that was designed to guess the default password of all the devices that had Internet connection.

 Another sabotage incident is associated with Butler Community College that claimed to fall victim of a DDoS attack. As the result of a distributed denial-of-service attack, the system was overloaded with data that caused temporal service interruption.