Empirical Study of Cyber Security Threats in Moldovan Higher Education Institutions

Abstract

Higher Education Institutions (HEIs) have always been the target of cyber attacks due to the information assets they hold. The move to online study as a result of restrictions imposed in the spring of 2020 has led to increased cyber security threats to academia due to the vulnerabilities of online learning platforms and video conferencing applications. The hypothesis of this paper was that Moldovan Higher Education Institutions had to face cyber security challenges similar to international higher education institutions, through the empirical study, the use of the questionnaire-based survey to collect quantitative data from stakeholders of the institutions. The results of the survey conducted between September and November 2020, showed that HEIs in Moldova are targeted by cyber attacks as well as international ones and the nature of threats is mostly the same, namely: malware, phishing and DoS attacks.