May 15, 2020 – Netwrix announced additional findings from its 2020 Data Risk & Security Report . The report reveals that many educational organizations are at risk of data security incidents during the current period of working from home and virtual learning. According to the survey, even before the COVID-19 pandemic, the majority of educational organizations had weak data security controls. In particular, 54% of IT professionals in the educational sector confessed that employees put data at risk by sharing it via cloud apps outside of IT knowledge. This is the highest percentage among all verticals surveyed.
The move to distance learning increases this risk even more. Other notable findings of the report include:
- 82% of educational organizations don’t track data sharing at all or do it manually, and 50% of them suffered a data breach due to unauthorized data sharing last year.
- 63% of educational organizations don’t review permissions regularly, and 24% of system administrators admitted to granting direct access rights upon user request.
- 28% of respondents discovered data outside of secure locations, which is the highest number of all industries surveyed.
- Only 8% of respondents have developed cybersecurity and risk KPIs to evaluate their security posture and track success.
This data was left exposed for days (40%) or months (33%).
