"Education Accounts for 7.3% of Cybersecurity Incidents Across Industries in 2022, Up from 2.8% in 2021"
IBM Security's X-Force Threat Intelligence Index for 2023 found that education, sixth on the list of ten evaluated industries, accounted for 7.3 percent of all cybersecurity incidents in 2022, up from 2.8 percent of all incidents in 2021. IBM Security noted that it changed how it analyzed some of its data to provide a more insightful and useful picture of cybersecurity threats. The report emphasizes backdoor activities, extortion, phishing, and hacktivism/malware as key threats. In 2022, extortion attacks accounted for 27 percent of incidents across all industries, deployment of backdoor access for 21 percent, and ransomware attacks for 17 percent. Despite a 52 percent decrease in phishing attacks aimed at stealing credit card information, IBM reported that 41 percent of initial access incidents involved phishing, with 62 percent of those using spear phishing attachment techniques. IBM Security X-Force responded to the exploitation of public-facing applications on initial access, spear phishing attachments, backdoor attacks, and more in the education industry alone. The company reported that Asia-Pacific was the target of 67 percent of all attacks, followed by North America (27 percent) and Latin America (6 percent). This article continues to discuss key findings from IBM Security's X-Force Threat Intelligence Index for 2023 pertaining to the education industry.