Dr Shaanan Cohney, a senior professor of cybersecurity, computer science and information systems at the University of Melbourne, said current and former Deakin students should be alert to suspicious messages they receive, especially with the pretense of being the University.
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“If it looks like fish, if it sounds too good to be true, it probably is,” he said. “Once a hack has occurred, it’s quite difficult for a person to do much more to protect themselves apart from normal best information security practices.”
The education and training sector is heavily attacked by hackers, according to data from the Australian Cyber Security Center. Its latest annual report, for the period 2020-21, revealed that education and training providers reported 6.2% of cybersecurity incidents that year, the fifth highest proportion by sector.
Cohney said universities were attractive targets for hackers because they were large institutions that stored a lot of information.
“In addition to its 20,000 staff members, you will have 30, 40, 50,000 students and all of these people have access to protected network resources,” he said. “Universities are especially diverse and diversity means that not all of these people will have the same level of sophistication when it comes to protecting university resources.
“So when they try to trick people into clicking on something or opening an emailed file or answering a suspicious call, with a lot of people and a lot of diverse people, it will be easier to get that breakthrough.”
When hackers accessed people’s specific information, they could use it to “spear phishing,” he said. “So you may receive an email that says, ‘Hello, James, we realized you recently suspended a class. We’d like to give you a chance to repurchase your degree at a cost of $ 1,000.’ ”
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