Cyber spying on universities is the practice of obtaining secrets and information without the permission and knowledge of the university through its information technology system. Universities in the United Kingdom, including Oxford and

Cambridge Cambridge ( ) is a List of cities in the United Kingdom, city and non-metropolitan district in the county of Cambridgeshire, England. It is the county town of Cambridgeshire and is located on the River Cam, north of London. As of the 2021 Unit ...

, have been targets, as have institutions in the United States and

Australia Australia, officially the Commonwealth of Australia, is a country comprising mainland Australia, the mainland of the Australia (continent), Australian continent, the island of Tasmania and list of islands of Australia, numerous smaller isl ...

. Universities are targets for

cyber espionage Cyber espionage, cyber spying, or cyber-collection is the act or practice of obtaining secrets and information without the permission and knowledge of the holder of the information using methods on the Internet, networks or individual computers th ...

due to the wealth of

personally identifiable information Personal data, also known as personal information or personally identifiable information (PII), is any information related to an identifiable person. The abbreviation PII is widely used in the United States, but the phrase it abbreviates has fou ...

they possess on students, employees, people who buy tickets to sporting events, and, if the university has an

academic medical center The Academic Medical Center (Dutch: ''Academisch Medisch Centrum''), or AMC, was the university hospital affiliated with the University of Amsterdam. After merging with the VU University Medical Center, it now operates as the Amsterdam Universi ...

, on patients treated there. Information about research projects with industrial or military application are also targets. The culture of information sharing within universities tends to make them easy targets. Breaches can occur from people sharing credentials,

phishing Phishing is a form of social engineering and a scam where attackers deceive people into revealing sensitive information or installing malware such as viruses, worms, adware, or ransomware. Phishing attacks have become increasingly sophisticate ...

, web-crawlers inadvertently finding exposed access points,

password cracking In cryptanalysis and computer security, password cracking is the process of guessing passwords protecting a computer system. A common approach (brute-force attack) is to repeatedly try guesses for the password and to check them against an availab ...

, and other standard hacking methods. University credentials are bought and sold on web forums,

darknet market A darknet market is a commercial website on the dark web that operates via darknets such as Tor and I2P. They function primarily as black markets, selling or brokering transactions involving drugs, cyber-arms, weapons, counterfeit currency, ...

s and other

black market A black market is a Secrecy, clandestine Market (economics), market or series of transactions that has some aspect of illegality, or is not compliant with an institutional set of rules. If the rule defines the set of goods and services who ...

s. The result of such efforts have included theft of military research into missile design or stealth technologies, as well as medical data. As a precaution against such attacks, Stanford University advises its employees to take IT precautions when they travel abroad. Moreover, in March 2018, the United States charged and sanctioned nine Iranians and the Iranian company Mabna Institute for hacking and attempting to hack hundreds of universities on behalf of the Iranian government. Credentials used by

Sci-Hub Sci-Hub is a library website that provides free access to millions of research papers, regardless of copyright, by bypassing publishers' paywalls in various ways. Unlike Library Genesis, it does not provide access to books. Sci-Hub was found ...

to access paywalled scientific articles have been subsequently used by hackers seeking to breach university firewalls to access other information.

References

{{reflist Cybercrime Cyberwarfare Types of espionage Military intelligence collection Hacking (computer security) Information sensitivity National security Social engineering (security) Computing terminology

See also

References