Amidst rising cyber fears in higher education institutions, it’s been revealed that University College London (UCL) faced almost 60 million “malicious” email attacks in the first three months of 2022.

The data was obtained through a Freedom of Information Act request and analysed by the Parliament Street think tank. It revealed a total of 58,628,604 spam, phishing, malware and edge block attacks were mitigated by the university between 24 December 2021 and 23 March 2022.

Edge block, which automatically blocks email messages sent to recipients that do not exist at an Office 365 tenant, accounted for 88 per cent, or 51,445,726, of “malicious attacks blocked”, said Parliament Street.

There were also 6,720,913 spam emails. Meanwhile, phishing accounted for 408,212 attacks, and malware for 53,753 attacks.

“Education institutions are regularly targeted by cyber criminals who want to get hold of the valuable information and data they hold, such as world-leading research, intellectual property and the personal financial details of thousands of university staff, students and alumni,” said Tim Sadler, chief executive of security firm Tessian. “Due to the people-heavy nature of the industry, and reliance on email to stay connected with one another, phishing is an easy way ‘in’ for these cyber criminals, and it quickly leads to a loss of data and ransomware attempts.”

He said it was “imperative” that universities understand the ways in which their staff and students could be targeted by phishing campaigns, and train them on what to look for.

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