Until recently, universities had been attacked only very occasionally. One of the last in this sad line-up was the University of Michigan. But the last year has also seen major attacks against accelerators and telescopes ─ as collateral damage and as the attackers’ main focus, respectively.
Over the past 12 months, the CERN Computer Security team has tirelessly helped dozens of universities worldwide to protect themselves against such “ransomware” attacks (see our monthly security reports) and improve their defences, as well as providing training, tipping them off to imminent danger where our threat intel permits and assisting them in incident response when it was too late and damage had been done.