In the past, purchasing cybersecurity insurance was considered a luxury rather than a necessity. However, as the number of cyber attacks continues to grow, many educational institutions have started to buy insurance policies to cover the damaging costs of malware and ransomware attacks. The education sector saw the most cyber attacks in 2021 and 2022 compared to every other industry, including healthcare and finance.
While PCI compliance sets an industry benchmark surrounding cybersecurity for the financial sector, organizations shouldn’t rely on it to protect themselves against data breaches. The harsh truth is that cybercriminals will exploit any weakness in an organization’s IT infrastructure to gain unauthorized access to sensitive data, not just those covered by PCI DSS compliance requirements.
Managing individual business risks is difficult when silos exist. An enterprise risk management (ERM) framework consolidates risk management strategy across an entire organization, enabling better visibility, measurement, and management of business objectives. With a unified focus on addressing risk, compliance teams can universally improve regulatory compliance, governance, and risk management processes.
Independent school districts (ISDs) are the perfect target for cybercriminals because their networks are typically poorly secured. Many schools have inadequate security practices due to the lack of education, training, or funding. ISDs are publicly funded primary and secondary educational institutions, including elementary, middle, and high schools.
Keeping up with ever-changing regulatory requirements for cybersecurity can prove difficult for many organizations, which may unknowingly become non-compliant if they fail to adapt to new laws and regulations. Healthcare organizations and financial services must be even more vigilant with compliance. Both sectors are subject to even stricter requirements due to the large quantities of personally identifiable information (PII) they manage.
Vendor security questionnaires are frustrating, both to the organizations sending them and the vendors receiving them. While these frustrations remain unaddressed, they will only continue to impede the efficiency of vendor risk management programs. Fortunately, suffering through security assessments isn’t an unavoidable by-product of a Vendor Risk Management program. With the correct strategies, you can streamline the entire assessment questionnaire lifecycle. Read on to learn how.
Today’s threat landscape is driven by digital transformation and the outsourcing of critical operations to third-party vendors. Cybercriminals’ high demand for sensitive data paired with a historical lack of cybersecurity investment across the industry is cause for concern. Healthcare organizations recognize they have the choice to either increase their cyber spending or inevitably fall victim to a costly data breach. However, investing in cybersecurity solutions alone isn’t enough.
The Higher Education Community Vendor Assessment Toolkit (HECVAT) helps higher education mitigate the impact of security risks of vendor relationships offering cloud-based services. With supply chain attacks on the rise, and vendor risks ranking in the top three initial attack vectors for data breaches, HECVAT compliance is becoming a mandatory requirement for partnering with higher education institutions.
Having a plan to back up your data is one of the most important processes to protect the data in the event of a cyber attack. Should a malware or ransomware attack occur, you can boot a saved backup and restore your data to its previous state. Some organizations might use cloud-based solutions like Google Drive or Dropbox, while others prefer to keep their backups on an external hard drive. However, to ensure total data security, your backup strategy should include multiple solutions.
