Lost and found: testing cybersecurity preparedness at a university.

This study was conducted to assess the cybersecurity preparedness of a college-level population. As the world becomes more dependent on computers, it becomes more essential and more difficult to protect them. While bad actors are certainly capable of infiltrating a system without inside help, the number of attacks initiated by simple poor computer safety hygiene far outweighs all other attack methods. Given that universities have digital access to not only the personally identifying information (PII), but also the academic and professional work of thousands of people, they are particularly tempting targets. This experiment was undertaken to learn how likely a university is to fall prey to a cyberattack, in an effort to guard against real attacks in the future. The results demonstrated a disconnect between cybersecurity best practices and whom the practices are built to protect, with the target university’s population being snared by a simple, low effort, and easily avoidable attack vector: “infected” USB drives. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]