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Educational Institutions Overpay Ransomware Extortionists: Sophos

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Sophos has released findings from its annual sector survey report, “The State of Ransomware in Education 2024.” According to the report, the median ransom payment was $6.6 million for lower education and $4.4 million for higher education organisations. In addition, the survey states that 55% of lower education respondents and 67% of higher education respondents paid more than the initial demand.

Ransomware attacks are causing more of a strain as only 30% of ransomware victims surveyed in both lower and higher education were able to fully recover in a week or less, down from last year’s 33% (lower education) and 40% (higher education). This slowing recovery rate is likely due to education organisations operating with limited teams and resources, making it harder for them to coordinate recovery efforts.

“Unfortunately, schools, universities and other educational institutions are targets that are beholden to municipalities, communities and the students themselves, which inherently creates high-pressure situations if they are hit and destabilised by ransomware. Educational institutions feel a sense of responsibility to remain open and continue providing their services to their communities. These two factors could be contributing to why victims feel so much pressure to pay,” said Chester Wisniewski, director, field CTO, Sophos.

“We also know that ransomware attackers have upped the ante when it comes to getting paid. Compromising their victims’ backups is now a mainstream element of ransomware attacks, allowing adversaries to subsequently increase the ransom demand when it is clear that the data cannot be recovered without the decryption key.”

95% of respondents said that cybercriminals tried to compromise their backups during the attack, with 71% being successful – the second-highest backup compromise rate across all industry sectors. Having backups compromised also considerably increases recovery costs, with the total bill coming in five times higher in lower education and four times higher in higher education.

Despite difficult dealings with ransomware, the overall attack rate dropped over the last year. Sixty-three per cent of lower education organisations and 66% of higher education organisations were hit by ransomware attacks – down from 80% and 79%, respectively. At the same time, the rate of data encryption has increased slightly, with eighty-five per cent of attacks on lower education and 77% of attacks on higher education organisations resulting in data encryption, slightly up from 81% and 73%, respectively, reported in the 2023 survey. Unfortunately, cybercriminals are not only encrypting data, they’re also stealing it, using it as leverage to further monetise the attack. Twenty-two per cent of lower education organisations that had data encrypted said the data was also stolen, together with 18% in higher education.

The survey reveals that exploited vulnerabilities were the leading root cause of attacks in education, providing cybercriminals with a way into the network for 44% of lower education and 42% of higher education ransomware attacks. Based on this Sophos survey data, schools and other educational organisations could benefit from a layered security approach that includes vulnerability scanning and patching prioritisation guidance to reduce their attack surface, endpoint protection with anti-ransomware capabilities that automatically detect and stop attacks, and 24/7 human-led managed detection and response (MDR) services to neutralise advanced human-led attacks, ideally leveraging telemetry from backup solutions to detect and stop adversaries before they can cause damage.

“While there appears to be some positive progress towards combatting ransomware in the education sector, it’s concerning that the rate of data encryption continues to increase year after year, which suggests educational organisations need to continue working towards improving their ransomware resilience. With stretched resources and limited budgets, education organisations need to focus on the controls that will have the greatest impact. With the median ransomware recovery cost for education now hitting $3 million, it’s clear that investing in strong prevention and protection solutions can considerably reduce the overall financial impact of cyber on educational organisations,” said Wisniewski.

Sophos’ report this year incorporates new areas of study: insight into the role of law enforcement in ransomware remediation for education providers. Ninety-nine per cent of lower education and 98% of higher education organisations engaged with law enforcement and/or official government bodies following a ransomware attack. As a result, 64% of lower education organisations and 66% of higher education organisations benefitted from advice about dealing with the attack. Sixty-one per cent of lower and higher education organisations received help and support investigating the attack, and nearly 49% of lower education organisations and 48% of higher education organisations sought law enforcement’s help recovering data encrypted in the attack.

Data for the State of Ransomware in Education 2024 report comes from a vendor-agnostic survey of 600 cybersecurity/IT leaders working in the education sector conducted between January and February 2024. Respondents were based in 14 countries across the Americas, EMEA, and Asia Pacific. All respondents represent organisations with between 100 and 5,000 employees.

Cloud

SentinelOne Simplifies Secure Cloud Migrations on AWS

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SentinelOne today announced its participation in the Amazon Web Services (AWS) Independent Software Vendor (ISV) Workload Migration Program. This initiative supports AWS Partner Network (APN) members with SaaS offerings on AWS to accelerate and streamline workload migrations.

Through the program, SentinelOne will provide AWS customers with accelerated, secure cloud migration support, leveraging modern AI-powered CNAPP capabilities to ensure rapid and protected transitions. With access to AWS funding, technical resources, and go-to-market support, SentinelOne will help organizations reduce migration timelines and costs while maintaining robust security.

SentinelOne’s Singularity Cloud Security delivers real-time visibility and protection throughout the migration journey—whether from on-premises or another cloud—enabling a secure, seamless transition to AWS.

“Through our participation in the AWS ISV Workload Migration Program, SentinelOne is helping customers accelerate secure cloud migrations with end-to-end protection and visibility,” said Ric Smith, President of Product, Technology, and Operations at SentinelOne. “Whether moving from on-prem or another cloud to AWS, organizations can count on us to deliver the security they need throughout their journey—realizing the performance, speed, agility, and cost benefits of the cloud.”

Singularity Cloud Security combines agentless and agent-based protection for deep visibility, continuous posture management, and real-time threat detection across hybrid and multi-cloud environments. By collaborating with AWS and ecosystem partners, SentinelOne ensures seamless integration into migration projects, helping customers move faster, reduce risk, and scale confidently in the cloud.

Availability: SentinelOne’s solutions are available globally.

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Cyber Security

Beyond Blocklists: How Behavioural Intent Analysis Can Safeguard Middle East Businesses from Rising AI-Driven Bot Threats

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The Middle East is facing an unprecedented surge in AI-driven bot attacks, with malicious automation now outpacing traditional defenses. Mohammad Ismail, Vice President for EMEA at Cequence Security, warns that legacy tools like IP blocklists and rate limiting are no match for today’s sophisticated threats (more…)

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Cyber Security

Sophos Boosts Firewall with New Protection and Incident Response Features

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Sophos has announced a significant update to its Sophos Firewall software, introducing enhanced protection and incident response capabilities. This update notably includes Sophos NDR Essential, a new feature now available free of charge to all customers holding an XStream Protection license for Sophos Firewall.

This integration empowers Sophos Firewall with two dedicated artificial intelligence (AI) engines specifically designed to detect both malware communications and those utilizing algorithmically generated domain names. This advanced functionality, derived from the Sophos Network Detection and Response (NDR) probe, aims to identify sophisticated malware communications even if they are previously unknown or not yet indexed. It serves as a powerful complement to the Active Threat Response capabilities already embedded within Sophos firewalls.

Chris McCormack, Senior Product Marketing Manager at Sophos

Addressing the technical demands of such advanced detection, Chris McCormack, Senior Product Marketing Manager at Sophos, explained the strategic approach, “NDR traffic analysis requires substantial processing power. That’s why we’ve adopted a new approach by deploying an NDR solution in Sophos Cloud to offload the heaviest tasks from the firewall.” This cloud-centric design ensures optimal performance without burdening the firewall’s on-device resources.

Beyond network detection, the update also brings significant improvements to connectivity and user authentication. Sophos Connect now integrates EntraID for Single Sign-On (SSO). This new feature for the VPN client, bundled with Sophos Firewall, is set to enhance both the security and user experience for SSL and IPsec VPN connections. The integration with EntraID (Azure AD) enables users to authenticate and leverage multi-factor authentication for both Sophos Connect and access to the user portal hosted by the firewall, streamlining secure access.

Further VPN-related enhancements include:

  • Improved user interface and usability: Connection types have been renamed for greater clarity, with “site-to-site” now referred to as “policy-based” and tunnel interfaces as “route-based,” making configurations more intuitive.
  • Dynamic validation of the IP address pool: For VPN connections (SSL VPN, IPsec, L2TP, and PPTP), the system now dynamically validates the allocated IP address pool, helping to better resolve potential IP address conflicts.
  • Strict profile enforcement: IPsec profiles now exclude default values to ensure algorithm synchronization, effectively eliminating potential fragmentation of session negotiation packets that could otherwise prevent site-to-site VPN tunnels from being established.
  • Route-based VPN and SD-RED scalability: The system has been optimized to support up to 3,000 simultaneously established tunnels. Specifically, Sophos Firewall solutions can now manage up to 1,000 SD-RED site-to-site tunnels and connect up to 650 concurrent SD-RED devices.

Additional management improvements enhance administrative flexibility and search capabilities:

  • More flexible DHCP Prefix Delegation (IPv6 DHCP-PD): The system now supports a broader range of prefixes, from /48 to /64, improving compatibility with various internet service providers.
  • Router Advertisement (RA) and DHCPv6 server: These features are now enabled by default, simplifying IPv6 network setup.
  • Resizable table columns: The web admin interface continues its adaptation for ultra-wide screens, with many configuration pages now allowing users to resize columns as needed for improved usability.
  • Enhanced object search functionality: The search field within the SD-WAN routing configuration screen now supports more granular criteria, including route name, ID, objects, and object values like IP addresses and domains. Similarly, local ACL rules now also support object name and value searches, extending to content-based searches for more precise results.
  • Default configuration changes: To streamline initial setups, default firewall rules and rule groups previously created during new firewall deployments have been removed. The initial configuration now only includes the default network rule and MTA rules. Furthermore, the default firewall rule group and the default gateway probe for custom gateways are now set to “None” by default.

Sophos continues its commitment to cybersecurity through a “Secure by Design” approach, enhancing the intrinsic security of its firewalls. This methodology involves the containerization of specific features and rigorous integrity checks on critical operating system files using mathematical checksums. Any detected checksum mismatch triggers a potential compromise alert, enabling monitoring teams to proactively identify possible security incidents affecting the firewall OS integrity. This proactive detection allows incident response and development teams to react swiftly to critical security events.

This update is now available for manual download and deployment by customers with any Sophos Firewall equipped with a valid license.

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