With remote learning growing more rapidly than ever before, K-12 schools and higher education institutions have been forced to adopt or advance their learning management systems and email communications to students and other stakeholders. Cybercriminals have noticed and as a result, phishing attacks on schools have soared to create a greater risk for Family Educational Rights and Privacy Act (FERPA) compliance, digital asset protection, intellectual property loss, and institutional trust.
The FBI estimates that email account compromise scams accounted for more than $26 billion in losses, including school districts, colleges and universities. When an institution of higher education suffers a data breach, not only are there losses from misdirected funds and clean-up costs, but also media attention and tarnished brand reputation.
According to AT&T Cybersecurity, “As schools across the globe turn digital due to students studying from home, they are becoming more vulnerable targets to cyberattacks. Schools are finding themselves outmatched as these threats intensify.”
Overview
A community college’s IT Security Team was researching the controls needed to secure its domain and email to protect student, faculty, staff and alumni and noticed the rise of DMARC in discussion forums and posts.
Situation
“There were indications that the Department of Education may soon require the adoption of DMARC. Experience was a substantial factor when we began searching for a DMARC partner. We read that one of the founders of dmarcian was instrumental in drafting the original standard; that knowledge gave us comfort and confidence in the expertise of dmarcian. When evaluating each of the vendors, it was clear that dmarcian was a leader, understood higher education, and worked with other higher education customers.”
Challenge
“Early on we had no idea it would be so challenging to work with specific vendors. It was surprising to interact with other vendors who didn’t have depth in their expertise. In working with the dmarcian sales, support and compliance services teams, the college gained clarity and a better understanding of SPF, DKIM and DMARC.”
Result
“It isn’t out of the realm of possibility for an email expert to figure out DMARC and implement it. That said, there are a lot of folks on small information security teams that have some knowledge about email but perhaps not the details of DNS management. The manner in which dmarcian educated us, was transparent, and helped us forge a path to compliance is unique in technology and definitely something that stood out in the process with them.”
dmarcian is here to help educational organizations deploy DMARC authentication to fight business email compromise, phishing and spoofing with our DMARC Management Platform, educational resources, and expert support.
