# A Systematic Review of Cybersecurity Risks in Higher Education
## 6 Cyber Threat Events in HE
### Threat Event Summary  
The literature study unveiled six distinct sources of literature relating to the threat events, including 4 Verizon reports. [PERSON] and [PERSON] [2], [PERSON] [9], [PERSON] [8], and [PERSON] [53] and [PERSON] [60] specified their data set as exclusively from HEL Verizon [61; 62; 63; 64] and Hackmageddon [65; 66] address threats from the educational industry as a category. Table 11 summarizes our findings of threat events ranked by occurrence per source. [PERSON] [8] only provided the histogram without exact numbers, the ranking is approximate and the numbers cannot be discerned from his figures. Despite different classifications it seems that _Hacking_, _Malware_, and _Social engineering_-attacks appears to be the most occurring threat events in HE. _Hacker_, _Hacking_ and _Hacking_ are the dominating events in Table 11. The _Hacking_ are at the top in [PERSON] and [PERSON] (38%) [2], Grama (36%) [60], and Verizon (33%) [61; 62; 63; 64]. _Hacking_ is not a category in the three first columns, however, they contain related threat events, such as _Compromised asset_[6; 9] and _Compromise_[8]. Social engineering tops the statistics (26%) in [PERSON] [9], while malware tops the statistics in Chapman [8] and in Hackmageddon (35%) [65; 66]. This can be attributed to the rising of malware and ransomware describes in the paper from [PERSON] and [PERSON] [50]. Table 11 also illustrates that \"Error\", \"Misuse\" and \begin{table}
\begin{tabular}{l l l} \hline \hline
**Attacks (Threat Events)** & **2018** & **2019** \\ \hline Malware/PoS Malware & 16 & 71 \\ \hline Account Hjacking & 30 & 26 \\ \hline Unknown & 20 & 20 \\ \hline Targeted Attacks & 4 & 4 \\ \hline Vulnerability & 1 & 2 \\ \hline Brute-Force & 0 & 2 \\ \hline DDoS & 2 & 0 \\ \hline Defacement & 0 & 1 \\ \hline Malicious Script Injection & 0 & 1 \\ \hline Malicious Spam & 0 & 1 \\ \hline SQLi & 1 & 0 \\ \hline
**Total** & **74** & **128** \\ \hline \hline \end{tabular}
\end{table} 
Table 10: Statistics from Hackmageddon.com (Visited 28 January 2021) [65; 66] of attacks (threat events) for the “Education” category, 2018 (\(n=74\)) and 2019 (\(n=128\)). \begin{table}
\begin{tabular}{l l l l l l l l l} \hline \hline
**Source** & **Wangen [9]** & **Chapman [8]** & **UNIT [6]** & **Neube [2]** & **Mello [53]** & **Verizon [61; 62; 63; 64]** & **Hackmag. [65; 66]** \\ \hline Coll. & 2017 & 2018 & 2018 & 2005–2009 & 2005–2014 & 2017–2020 & 2018–2019 \\ Year & 2018–2019 & 2018–2019 & 2018–2019 & 2018–2019 & 2018–2019 & 2018–2019 \\ \hline
1 & Soc.Eng. (26\%) & Malware & Vuln. assets (70\%) & Hacker (38\%) & HACK (39\%) & Hacking (33\%) & Malware (43\%) \\ \hline
2 & Comp. asset (20\%) & Copyright & Comp. asset (10\%) & Exposed (28\%) & DISC (29\%) & Social (26\%) & Account Hij. (27\%) \\ \hline
3 & Comp. user (16\%) & Compromise & Scanning (10\%) & Stolen (25\%) & PORT (16\%) & Error (21\%) & Unknown (19\%) \\ \hline
4 & Vuln. asset (12\%) & DoS & Comp. system & Missing (6\%) & STAT (5\%) & Malware (14\%) & Targeted Att. (4\%) \\ \hline
5 & Copyright (12\%) & Unauth. use & DDOS & Insider (2\%) & PHYS (5\%) & Misuse (4\%) & Vulnerability (2\%) \\ \hline
6 & Abuse (5\%) & Scanning & Spam & & INSD (3\%) & Physical (3\%) & Brute-Force (1\%) \\ \hline
7 & Malware(4\%) & Phishing & Query & & UNKN (1\%) & & DDoS (1\%) \\ \hline
8 & Other (5\%) & Other & Other & & CARD (0\%) & & Other (2\%) \\ \hline n & 550 & \(\sim\)6100 & 965 & 290 & 604 & 663 & 202 \\ \hline \hline \end{tabular}
\end{table} 
Table 11: The rank of the threat events present in the educational industry according to the literature. \"Unintended disclosure\" are also occurring frequently in educational institutions, which can be attributed to human errors in HEI. Other threat events like: \"Physical loss\", \"Stolen\", \"Insider\", and \"Defacement\" are also present threats in educational institutions but occur in minor quantities. However, these events can cause loss of confidential information.