Please don’t tell me it’s Window’s Defender!

Cyber-attacks happen and are increasing in frequency. Certain sectors are naturally susceptible to these attacks; banking, government, healthcare, and energy sectors will always be targets due to the nature of what they do. But did you know that the Education sector is also very high up the list?

Around 20% of all educational institutions have been specifically targeted by cyber criminals, and a MASSIVE 83% of UK schools had experienced at least one cyber security incident. There are many other scary statistics that can be quoted, and you would think that with this information being readily available for review, schools and other institutions would take cyber security seriously; you would think wrong.

It’s just not good enough

Here at Planet IT, we have many dealings with the education sector, whether that be providing fully managed support, running security health checks or just the facilitating the procurement of specific classroom hardware, we have seen how vulnerable a lot of school environments are. We talk to schools daily and something that keeps coming up is the widespread use of Microsoft Windows Defender as the sole endpoint security solution. Something else that keeps being apparent on most calls we join is that the on-site IT team are too busy being reactive and fighting fires to spend the time being proactive and looking at the bigger picture.

Microsoft Windows Defender is a consumer-grade antivirus that is native to Windows 10 and comes preconfigured. There is an anti-ransomware element to it, but the testing we have done in the past shows that it is not capable of detecting most live ransomware threats:

So, what should you do?

Well, you should start with an industry-leading endpoint / server security solution such as Sophos Intercept X Advanced which will detect ANY Ransomware attack using the CryptoGuard element (this detects any file encryption attempts and rolls them back using Windows Shadow Copy if any encryption has started by the time it is stopped). This combined with the award-winning Endpoint Protection / Server Protection means that your endpoints and servers would enjoy a very high level of cyber security protection.

With any good security solution should come a good EDR product. EDR stands for Endpoint Detection & Response. This provides additional reporting and threat mitigation tools for your environment.

But does this really happen?

A real-world example that I have seen first-hand – we have a large private school as a customer. They were hit by ransomware which took down some critical file servers AND compromised the backups. With Sophos Intercept X Advanced with XDR (Sophos’ EDR offering), we were able to see that not only did Windows Defender not stop the ransomware from running but didn’t even detect it as a threat.

Also, with the recent Log4j vulnerabilities, and further back the Hafnium vulnerability, XDR was a requirement to investigate customers’ environments to easily check if they were open to attack due to these vulnerabilities. With Hafnium, XDR could report what hosts were vulnerable but also if they had been compromised and the location of the remote consoles that had been deployed by the bad actors. We at Planet IT saw at least 2 instances of Microsoft Exchange servers that had been compromised, and our job was made easier with XDR.

What if my team just don’t have the time to manage XDR.

The downside of adding XDR to Sophos Intercept X Advanced is that you need the resources to respond and investigate detected threats. Sure, Sophos Intercept X Advanced will of course detect and block any threats it comes across, but any advanced solution like this requires the time to configure and monitor to ensure you get the value from the product.

This is where MTR comes in; MTR (or Managed Threat Response) is a managed SOC (Security Operations Centre) provided by Sophos themselves, and will give 24/7 threat detection and activity reporting among many other benefits that are essential for any security conscious educational institution. With the Sophos MTR service, you can focus your time on ensuring your local infrastructure is running well safe in the knowledge that your Sophos environment is being looked after competently.

Planet IT recommends Sophos Intercept X Advanced with XDR and MTR Standard as the minimum level of protection for any educational institution.