Georgia Tech Data Breach: How to Keep Information Secure in Open University Environments

Georgia Tech recently notified almost 1.3 million people about a potential breach of sensitive data, and in some cases, including a social security number. Over a four month period, there was a vulnerable server that allowed people to enumerate records on a back-end database, allowing the exfiltration of sensitive information. While universities are seen as more open environments, they do have sensitive information they have to protect.

How do you keep information secure while still meeting the requirements of an open environment like a university? Here are three important takeaways for safeguarding your information:

• Attackers are constantly scanning websites for vulnerabilities. These scanners operate from well-known infrastructure because such activity is very loud and noticeable by thousands of web honeypots all over the world.
• Once attackers find vulnerable websites, they shift to other infrastructure to do more high-end attacks to actually extract the information. That infrastructure also tends to be well known.
• By using threat intelligence and automatically updating firewalls or WAFs, you can achieve protection for your sebservers by blocking would-be attackers without worrying about blocking your actual customers.

ThreatSTOP's IP Defense can protect against attacks against your public webservers and help protect your sensitive information. Learn more below, request a quick demo or a free 14-day trial.