Impacts of the Covid-19 Pandemic on Online Security Behavior within the UK Educational Industry.

The emergence of the Covid19 pandemic has caused the shutdown of university activities on campus in the UK. There has been a migration of learning, teaching and assessment (LTA) into online virtual environments. This in turn resulted in a spike in cyber-attacks across educational businesses, as they seemed more vulnerable due to inadequate security systems that would facilitate online learning. In this research, the impact of the corona virus pandemic on the security behavior of academic businesses is uncovered. This is done by comparing the pre-pandemic annual cyber security survey with the peak and post-pandemic survey, i.e., 2019, 2020 and 2021 respectively. Findings from this research demonstrate that the pandemic brought about a rise in cyber-attack, which made universities prioritize security, and add defensive measures to ease online learning. Overall, the post-pandemic statistics suggests that educational businesses have improved their systems with adequate security measures, which makes the migration to online learning safe. That said, cyber attackers are innovative and will continue to impose a threat to these institutions. Therefore, improving security systems is a continuous process even when the pandemic put under control significantly or even eradicated.