Known Vulnerabilities Across Higher Education: What the Data Shows and Why It Matters

You spend most of your time looking inward—managing assets, scanning for vulnerabilities, responding to alerts, and reporting on risk. Attackers do the opposite. They start from the outside, mapping what’s visible on the public internet and identifying what can be reused, exploited, or used as infrastructure.

Using cyber threat intelligence from more than 50 providers over six months, a study of the top 50 U.S. universities looked at higher ed from the outside in. What it found should change how you think about exposure: every university had assets with known vulnerabilities, including at least one critical issue, and every university appeared in intelligence tied to real malicious activity—36% of them with assets that were both vulnerable and already exploited by threat actors.

That challenges the idea that if risk isn’t obvious in your tools, it must be under control. In higher ed, much of your real exposure lives outside traditional visibility and changes faster than most programs can track.

This session uses that study to help you see your environment the way attackers do—starting from what’s visible on the internet, not what’s in your inventory. You’ll walk away with a clearer view of what the research reveals about higher ed exposure, including:

• Why visible assets with known vulnerabilities are so common in university environments

• What it means when university infrastructure shows up in real attacker activity

• How CTI reveals the difference between theoretical risk and real-world exploitation

• Why some vulnerabilities matter more

• What these findings suggest about how higher ed needs to think about defense going forward