Education & research
Schools, colleges, and universities run on suppliers they do not control.
Schools, colleges, and universities run on a dense layer of software: student record systems, learning platforms, admissions and finance systems, and the research and teaching applications staff rely on every day. Much of it is delivered by third-party suppliers, and when one trusted vendor or shared platform is breached, student and alumni data across dozens of institutions can be exposed at once.
The software underneath
- Student record and admissions systems
- Virtual learning environments like Moodle, Canvas, and Blackboard
- Research and analytics software such as MATLAB, SPSS, and R
- Fundraising, alumni, and finance platforms from third-party vendors
The Blackbaud breach
2020Blackbaud, a cloud software provider used across the sector for fundraising, alumni, and student data, was hit by ransomware in May 2020. Attackers exfiltrated data before Blackbaud paid the ransom. More than twenty UK universities, among them Leeds, Manchester, Birmingham, Bristol, Reading, and York, and over a hundred education and charity organisations, had alumni and student data stolen.
A single cloud supplier trusted across the sector exposed alumni and student data at dozens of universities at once.
UK GDPR and the Data Protection Act 2018
Student and alumni records are personal data under the UK GDPR. An institution stays accountable as the data controller for the third-party processors it uses, so a supplier's breach becomes the university's regulatory problem, enforced by the ICO.
See what is inside your software
Resolve the full dependency tree across research and application code and produce an SBOM, so an exposed component is visible the moment it is known.
Catch malicious and abandoned packages
Flag typosquats, malicious releases, and end-of-life dependencies that grant-funded and student code tends to accumulate.
Fix or gate in CI
Bump to a safe version and open a PR, or fail the build when there is no safe path, without adding staff you do not have.
Have you used Verifi in education & research?
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