Expert weighs in on school cyberattacks as University of Michigan makes progress on internet outages
(CBS DETROIT) - For the first time in nearly four days, the University of Michigan says students can now access their campus accounts.
On Tuesday, school officials released the following statement:
"Our team has made significant progress over the past 24 hours. All students, faculty, and staff can now authenticate into their U-M accounts and access http://umich.edu when using off-campus or cellular networks. Off-campus/cellular network access has also been restored to cloud-based services like Google products, Canvas, Adobe Creative Suite, Zoom, Wolverine Access, Dropbox, Slack, Duo, Wolverine Access, and more. We also continue to focus on restoring Wi-Fi and internet access. Further announcements will be made on https://umich.edu and https://twitter.com/umichTECH."
The latest internet outage comes amid a string of rising cyberattacks on schools.
In fact, the world's largest threat intelligence company, Recorded Future, reported that more than 120 schools have faced ransomware attacks in the first six months this year, compared to 188 last year.
But that's not all. Research shows schools are the fourth most targeted industry for hackers. Cyber security experts, like Gary Brickhouse, the chief information security officer for Guidepoint Security, say schools have become easy targets.
"The criminals know that these environments are more susceptible. And again, because of the amount of data that exists in these environments, it makes them a really ripe target," Brickhouse says.
When asked what the motive behind school cyberattacks, Brickhouse says it is about the money for hackers.
"The short answer is, it's for financial gain. These organizations are driven by financial gain. Either through the selling of the information, using the information for fraud, or through ransomware parents. They take the data and they basically say either we are going to expose it to the entire world or you can pay us x amount of dollars," Brickhouse says.
And it's more of those dollars that Brickhouse says schools will need in order to protect themselves from being compromised in the future.
"At the end of the day, that's really what can be done is to put more budget into the hands of these school systems to allow for better protection."
The university says it's continuing to work on fully restoring internet and Wi-Fi capabilities at their Ann Arbor, Flint, and Dearborn campuses. Students can view the latest updates regarding temporary internet outages at https://umich.edu and https://twitter.com/umichTECH.