In a recent press release, Pearson, one of the leading academic publishers in the United Kingdom, has admitted that its’ online platform AIMSweb has fallen victim to a cyberattack. The data of more than thirteen thousand student and teacher accounts were accessed during the attack.
According to a company statement, everyone whose personal information was affected by the attack has been notified, and the breach in security has been analyzed and resolved. The attack occurred back in November of last year, and in March 2019 the publishing house was informed by the FBI that their system had been compromised.
To compensate users for the stolen data, Person has decided to offer all affected users access to credit monitoring services for free. Currently, the exact number of individuals whose data was uncovered has not been announced, as some of the affected accounts contain thousands of students.
However, what is more concerning, is that cyberattacks like this one are becoming a daily occurrence in the educational sector.
Cyberattacks on academic systems
Just yesterday, the school year for the whole Houston County district in Alabama was postponed, because of a malware attack, which cannot be resolved. Last week, Lancaster University in the United Kingdom reported that their databases were hacked and the information of thousands of former, present, and future students was accessed.
Personal information is extremely sensitive, and hackers are well aware of that, which is why they turn to educational databases, as they are full of student and teacher data. Most school archives contain names, telephone numbers, email addresses, and even home addresses, which means that they are full of confidential personal details.
Considering the rise in cyberattacks in the past few months, many educational institutions have started revising the security of their networks, in an effort to prepare against such attacks.
