A Survey on Emerging Trends of Cyber Threats to Academic Research

Authors

Abhijit Kumar Nag, Texas A&M University-Central TexasFollow
Anitha Chennamaneni, Texas A & M University Central TexasFollow

Abstract

Hackers target universities for the sensitive and proprietary information stored in their systems. Cutting edge research conducted by university researchers makes them a prime target to cyber attackers. Universities, by nature, support open networks and access concepts to their stakeholders. Recent attacks attempted to exploit this open strategy to compromise or steal institutions’ data, research innovations, intellectual property and sensitive personally identifiable information (PII). This research study proposes a methodology for threat modeling and presents an example attack tree depicting a phishing attack to compromise the university network and steal sensitive information in research. A black-box threat model is proposed to categorize and rank cyber-threats to academic research. Furthermore, we provide a set of best practices to prevent and mitigate information security threats to academic research.

Recommended Citation

Nag, Abhijit Kumar and Chennamaneni, Anitha, "A Survey on Emerging Trends of Cyber Threats to Academic Research" (2020). AMCIS 2020 TREOs. 26.
https://aisel.aisnet.org/treos_amcis2020/26