Most IT and security teams are dealing with tighter budgets, new technology, and legacy network problems that make it difficult to stay on top of things. New AI-powered attacks, operational complexity, and understaffed teams are raising the stakes for delivering a secure and reliable network that works for everyone — students, staff, administration, and visitors.
Recent incidents at universities underscore the growing security and operations challenges campuses face. Research conducted by Nile as part of our State of Networking, Security & AI in Higher Education report cited cybersecurity as the top network challenge, with only 13% of university IT leaders surveyed stating they were very confident they could contain a breach.
Recent University of Pennsylvania Breaches Are a Prime Example
Last autumn, the university experienced two breaches within a single month. Without a Zero Trust Fabric in place, it only took a single breach to make it easy for attackers to exploit the inadequacies of their legacy network.
In October, attackers associated with the ShinyHunters group gained access to an SSO account through social engineering tactics before moving laterally onto sensitive internal systems. The attackers then sent over 700,000 vulgar and inflammatory emails from Penn’s .edu domain mocking Penn’s weak security.
In November, attackers from the Clop ransomware group exploited a vulnerability in Penn’s Oracle E-Business Suite (CVE-2025-61882) that also compromised Harvard University. Again, Penn’s overly permissive legacy network presented little resistance as more sensitive data was exfiltrated.
In both instances, investigators retained by the university noted that if Penn had implemented a dedicated and secure segmentation strategy, the intruders would have faced significant barriers. The failure to adopt adequate Zero Trust and segmentation measures directly led to the publishing of more than 1.2 million sensitive records, including donor history, banking data, and personal details on the dark web in February 2026.
Minimizing the Impact of Cyberattacks
The incidents at Penn underscore the broader challenge of securing higher education networks amid the limitations imposed by legacy networks. AI-powered vulnerability exploitation and the complexity of legacy security measures have made it increasingly difficult to prevent breaches, thus leading institutions have shifted to limiting the impact when breaches occur.
It’s my belief that patching a legacy network is only a band-aid, and many of today’s available add-ons only introduce complexity and gaps.
Nile was built from the ground up to address the shortcomings of legacy architectures by flipping how you secure a network on its head. Instead of connecting first and securing later, we’ve redesigned the campus network to secure-first and connect only once authorized. Our Zero Trust model ensures each device is isolated by default, while policy- and identity-based controls only allow explicitly authorized communication.
This transformative approach contains breaches and limits lateral movement without the need for VLANs, ACLs, and the complexity they bring. Our customers are able to reduce their breach and cyber risk by over 60% without NAC or other add-ons, enabling savings of around 25% on cybersecurity insurance premiums.
Resilient & Reliable Networking
Delivering network resilience demands more than security alone. IT and security teams must deliver reliable and stable connectivity 24/7/365.
In Nile’s research report State of Networking, Security & AI in Higher Education, we found that 61% of campuses surveyed experience monthly outages, while 94% said their teams are understaffed, constantly firefighting, or both. Clearly, the legacy model is not working for securing or providing a reliable network in higher education.
To alleviate the pressure experienced by IT teams, Nile’s AI-powered Autonomous Operations improves uptime, prevents outages, and drastically reduces network support tickets by more than 99%. Network monitoring, issue resolution, and routine changes are handled by closed-loop automation, freeing IT to focus on modernization and AI adoption.
From Fractured Fragility to Secure Simplicity
Nile’s research and the recent incidents mentioned point to why security and operational pressures are interconnected, directly impacting campus networks. Leaders with higher education and their IT teams must look beyond the traditional network vendors if there’s any hope in addressing the threats and outages that have never been more real.
Addressing these converging forces calls for a new approach to networking that builds security into the network and takes routine operations out of IT’s hands.
To Learn More
To see for yourself how Nile Secure NaaS is built to meet these challenges, request a demo today.