IARU offers various forums in order for some of the world’s leading universities to share experiences. Cybersecurity is one of the issues that all universities face. Its challenges often do not end on campus, but spread across personal, organizational, national, and possibly even international boundaries. Cybersecurity presents a truly global challenge.
The IARU Cybersecurity Forum aimed to address these challenges by offering a place for university IT service teams to share their experiences and thoughts on this topic. Stemming from an initiative of National University Singapore (NUS) several IT services managers met on 4 – 5 April 2018. The group included IT representatives from: NUS, Australian National University, University of Cape Town, Peking University, University of Tokyo, University of Copenhagen, and of course ETH Zurich. While representatives from UC Berkley, Yale, Cambridge, and Oxford - members of the IARU network - will also benefit from the outcomes of the Cybersecurity Forum, their representatives were unable to attend.
In our discussions, it quickly became obvious that we all face similar challenges. Phishing scams that solicit users to reveal personal or private information are becoming increasingly more sophisticated. Ransomware – software that blocks access to systems or networks until a sum of money is paid impacts our ability to respond punctually. We concluded that ransomware would likely be a growing issue in the future. Finally, the IT services teams of some of the universities reported instances of “Advanced Persistent Threats” (APT). These are highly sophisticated attacks on a network typically performed by intelligence agencies or global companies. They are designed in such a way as to steal information from an organization without anyone noticing it and, therefore, can remain undetected for a long period of time. IT services from universities who have not noticed an APT most likely have not yet discovered it. All of the forum’s participants believed that this type of threat would be observed more frequently and continue to occur more often.
The IARU Cybersecurity Forum aimed to address these challenges by offering a place for university IT service teams to share their experiences and thoughts on this topic. Stemming from an initiative of National University Singapore (NUS) several IT services managers met on 4 – 5 April 2018. The group included IT representatives from: NUS, Australian National University, University of Cape Town, Peking University, University of Tokyo, University of Copenhagen, and of course ETH Zurich. While representatives from UC Berkley, Yale, Cambridge, and Oxford - members of the IARU network - will also benefit from the outcomes of the Cybersecurity Forum, their representatives were unable to attend.
In our discussions, it quickly became obvious that we all face similar challenges. Phishing scams that solicit users to reveal personal or private information are becoming increasingly more sophisticated. Ransomware – software that blocks access to systems or networks until a sum of money is paid impacts our ability to respond punctually. We concluded that ransomware would likely be a growing issue in the future. Finally, the IT services teams of some of the universities reported instances of “Advanced Persistent Threats” (APT). These are highly sophisticated attacks on a network typically performed by intelligence agencies or global companies. They are designed in such a way as to steal information from an organization without anyone noticing it and, therefore, can remain undetected for a long period of time. IT services from universities who have not noticed an APT most likely have not yet discovered it. All of the forum’s participants believed that this type of threat would be observed more frequently and continue to occur more often.
