What Are The Top Ten Security Threats To Academia?

Agenda was proud to be invited to present at the prestigious Association of University Chief Security Officers (AUCSO) annual meeting in York in April. A presentation entitled “Delayering Research Facility Security” was delivered and extremely well received. During the meeting a survey of the top ten security threats was conducted by Agenda amongst the delegates. The top ten threats survey used was developed following a review of the guidelines provided by the Centre for the Protection of National Infrastructure, MI5 advice, Secured by Design principles and elements of the ISO27001 Information Management Security System. The delegates ranked the ten options in priority order and the results were as follows and show that Data and Information Loss is the primary concern, followed by Physical Security/Access, Lack of Security Awareness and Contingency/Business Continuity Planning. The graph below shows all of the results. This exercise was extremely useful to indicate the issues of concern to the University security professionals, issues in the free text comments section includes the screening of overseas students, financial constraints and issues around the failure/breakdown of security systems (alarms/access, control/CCTV) and resilience to outside interference. Feedback from AUCSO on the survey has been very positive and Agenda intends to compare the results across other groups that have been surveyed using the same format to compare the results for similarities and differences.