MIT may boast of having one of the smartest bunch of people under one roof, but when it comes to security benchmarks, it does not fair good. In fact, MIT ranks as the worst US university in terms of cyber-security protocols.
SecurityScorecard conducted a study of the United States’ universities and looked through the measures they have adopted to make their campus network secure. They assessed 485 colleges and universities on the basis of Web application security, network security, endpoint security, hacker chatter, social engineering, DNS health, IP reputation, patching cadence, password exposure, and Cubit score. The colleges chosen had to have 1,000 or more public-facing IP addresses. Each college was graded on the aforementioned criterion on the scale from A to F, and the final results were quite surprising. None of the top universities could get through the security test (Most of them got between D and F).
Merced Community College was ranked the most secure college followed by Concordia College, Adams State University, Centre College and Henry Ford Community College.
On the bottom of the list were some of the most prestigious education institutions. MIT was stated as the most insecure university in the US followed by New Mexico State University, Cambridge University, Temple University and the University of Virginia.
Most of the bottom list esteemed institutions failed on the criterion of password exposure, IP reputation, network security and patching.
Bureaucracy is the possible reason cited for the poor performance of these big universities. Also, the lapses in security are not acted upon quickly in the educational sector.
What do you think could be the reason for MIT’s miserable scores? Tell us in comments below.
