From kindergarten classes to the most advanced university research labs, educational institutions are experiencing an increase in cyber attacks. At the K-12 level, the number of ransomware, denial-of-service attacks, data breaches, and phishing attacks rose 18 percent in 2020 over the previous year. The numbers are also up for higher education as adversaries look for quick financial payoffs, useful personal information, and valuable research.
Telos® offers solutions that can help school systems and universities protect their students and their institutions from the disastrous results of security breaches. The Xacta® suite for cyber risk management and compliance is purpose-built to automate critical tasks in identifying and mitigating potential gaps in their cybersecurity posture.
Xacta can ingest real-time security data at scale from third-party security products and present the results as integrated, easy-to-read reports and dashboards for analysis and action. One powerful feature of Xacta is the ability to custom develop workflows that align with any size school division or university. The efficiency of these workflows can make risk management a continuous element in an organization’s overall security strategy.
Xacta also reduces audit fatigue when school systems and universities need to demonstrate compliance with security standards such as ISO 27000, FERPA, HIPAA, PCI-DSS, and others that these institutions face — just “test once, comply with many standards.” For universities involved in federal and defense research, Xacta supports compliance with NIST SP 800-171 and CMMC to protect the Controlled Unclassified Information (CUI) and Federal Contract Information (FCI) in their possession.
For the ultimate in K-12 security and privacy, there’s Telos Ghost® – the virtual obfuscation network that hides people and resources in the digital realm. Students can work with confidence, knowing they’re shielded from view to avoid cyber bullying and other breaches of their privacy. Ransomware attacks are frequently delivered via phishing attacks that target students and staff, who often fall prey to such attacks due to a lack of funding for cyber-awareness training. Telos Ghost can mitigate these risks by hiding devices and resources from internal or external unauthorized access and preventing any successful intrusions from spreading horizontally across the network by hiding those attack vectors as well.
Tomorrow’s innovations and next-generation breakthroughs are being developed, tested, and proven in higher education’s research laboratories. This advanced research needs to be protected from rogue nation-states and state-sponsored groups who are actively targeting intellectual property. Institutions of higher learning engaged in advanced research are frequently custodians of sensitive or classified data, often provided by federal and defense agencies for research purposes. As such, universities and research labs are the targets of ransomware as well as sustained cyber attacks. With Telos Ghost, universities can protect these resources by making data repositories and information systems invisible to unauthorized users.
Telos Ghost also integrates with educational and campus security solutions such as Omnilert and Johnson Controls to provide additional levels of protection to these offerings. It sheaths these Internet of Things systems in a privatized network that safeguards the devices and resources connected to it and protects student identities from discovery.
As a pioneer and innovator in secure mobility, Telos campus Wi-Fi networks enable users in academic environments to improve collaboration and learning while supporting personal and school-issued devices. Students and faculty in university research labs can work with the assurance a FIPS 140-2 compliant secure mobility network offers.
For cybersecurity expertise, Telos information assurance experts can help IT officials in education understand the full scope of the cyber risks they need to manage. We offer a range of assessment, compliance, and operational security services to protect systems and workloads in the cloud, on premises, and in hybrid environments. Telos can also help schools and universities migrate workloads to the cloud and keep them compliant with the relevant security standards.
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