Vulnerability Assessment, Remediation, and Automated Reporting: Case Studies of Higher Education Institutions

Scientific advances of higher education institutions make them attractive targets for malicious cyber-attacks. Modern scanners such as Nessus and Burp can pinpoint an organization's vulnerabilities for subsequent mitigation. However, the remediation reports generated from the tools often cause significant information overload while failing to provide actionable solutions. Consequently, higher education institutions lack the appropriate knowledge to improve their cybersecurity posture. In this study, we conduct a large-scale vulnerability assessment of 272 higher education institutions. From the results, we identified vulnerabilities that fail to provide comprehensive remediation strategies. Selected flaws are recreated and remediated in a virtual environment to develop enhanced, automated reporting mechanisms that provide succinct reports to enable the efficient vulnerability remediation. Our enhanced reports address 27.80% of vulnerabilities found in scanned higher education institutions.