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2023 National Cybersecurity Awareness Month at Biola

October 2, 2023


Cybersecurity Awareness Month 2023



October is National Cybersecurity Awareness Month, and each year we set aside these weeks to provide Information Security updates to the Biola Community. While October is just one month of the year, the IT Information Security team works year round to protect Biola’s people, resources, and reputation.

Did you know that this past year, various cyberattacks against higher education increased by over 500%? Thank you for your efforts to protect Biola’s data. We notice whenever you forward suspected phishing emails to phishing@biola.edu. We see each time someone clicks the Phish Alert Button in Gmail. We recognize all of you who took time to finish your cybersecurity training. We appreciate you and the way you’re protecting Biola!

Here are some updates about a new cyber defense platform, what we’ve done over the past year, and tips to improve your cybersecurity practices.


Falcon Boosts Biola’s Cyber Defense

We are excited to announce that this month, Information Technology will deploy an Endpoint Detection and Response (EDR) platform called CrowdStrike Falcon to all employee computers and university servers. This project is a massive undertaking, requiring coordination from multiple teams in Information Technology.

Falcon is a next-generation antivirus. While traditional antivirus scans your entire computer to find known malicious files, EDR products like Falcon use machine learning to identify malicious system behavior (like ransomware actively encrypting your data) and respond to it quickly and appropriately — and you won’t even notice that Falcon is running.

The Falcon application is lightweight and nonintrusive, and since it is behavior-based, it does not need to perform resource-intensive hard drive scans.

Our goal is to deploy the Falcon client to all Biola-managed Macs and PCs by the end of October. Expect a more in-depth announcement about Falcon in the coming weeks.


Year in Review

  • Data Breaches: Earlier this summer, the MOVEit data transfer service was breached by the Cl0p ransomware gang, a threat group based in Russia. This breach affected both United Healthcare and the National Student Clearinghouse, two services used at Biola. You can read about Biola’s response to the breach for more information.

  • Penetration Testing: Biola conducted an external penetration test, as part of our annual penetration testing program. An external penetration test simulates an attacker trying to break into Biola’s systems, testing the resilience of our outer defenses.

  • GLBA Compliance: Compliance is everyone’s responsibility at Biola, and the University is responsible for meeting federal guidelines and regulations. This year, the FTC published changes to the Safeguards Rule, which had a significant impact on how Biola must document and report on how we secure customer financial information collected for the purpose of financial services. Information Technology works closely with the pertinent departments all over campus to improve compliance.

  • Security Controls: Last year, Biola adopted the Center for Internet Security’s (CIS) Critical Security Controls framework, which specifies standards for securing Biola against cyber threats. This year, we established a methodology for systematically implementing each of the security controls. This is a multi-year project that involves all IT teams.

  • MFA: IT continues to migrate Biola’s enterprise systems to Microsoft SSO and MFA. MFA is crucial because it protects university data from attackers—even if they have access to your password. We hope to reach 100% of critical enterprise systems by the end of the year.

  • Simulated Phishing: Biola employees continue to improve in recognizing phishing attacks, reaching our lowest Phish Prone score since our program started, but there’s still work to be done! The simulated phishing messages that most frequently trick employees are (1) warnings that tell you to immediately change your password and (2) fake package tracking notifications.


What You Can Do

The most important overall action you can take is to stay alert. Attackers count on employees to fall for social engineering attacks.

The most important practical steps for you to take are to:

  • Complete your mandatory annual cybersecurity training, which we assign in the spring. To maintain a secure environment, and to remain compliant with industry standards, our employees must be trained each year.

  • Don’t make it easy for the attackers to access our data. This means that you should avoid clicking links in email messages or pop-ups on websites, avoid downloading and opening attachments, don’t submit your username and password except through trusted sites, watch out for phone and text phishing attacks. If anything about an email message or phone call seems at all suspicious, treat it as if it’s an attempted attack.

  • Create a culture of cybersecurity. Make sure the people on your team have good password habits, know how to store sensitive data, and are able to recognize imposter fraud. Always check our website for cybersecurity best practices, and reach out to us if you have any questions or concerns.

  • Protect your data. Make sure you know the protection levels for the data you handle, and that you're properly storing, sharing, and protecting university data.

Thank you for helping Biola stay secure!