Mushroom growth of edtech start-ups brings potential risk for the children's

The edtech market is estimated to grow 4X in the next five years, from $2.8 Bn (2020) to $10.4 Bn (2025). With growing adoption during the lockdown months, edtech services and products are expected to have an addressable base of 37 Mn-plus paid users by 2025.

India has the world’s largest population of school-going children - 265 million. That number will rise substantially if higher education is thrown into the mix. With schools and colleges shut because of the coronavirus outbreak, online education companies are stepping in to fill the breach. It’s an opportunity worth billions.

With the outbreak of Covid-19 in India, followed by lesser state-specific and local lockdowns in 2021, though, private and public schools have struggled to facilitate classes with the limited number of online resources available. The Education sector is now one of the biggest targets for cyber attacks, particularly since the start of the COVID pandemic in 2020.

Naturally, this opened up new frontiers for edtech startups in the Indian market, especially the ones looking at the enterprise or B2B segments. The educational sector is continuing to attract the attention of cybercriminals on the internet, according to new research from Kaspersky.

The recent spate of cyber attacks and data breaches have seen schools and universities grind to a halt, taking major systems offline and impacting classroom learning. It is a warning that cyber criminals are targeting the education sector and that schools should remain vigilant.

The company says the sector is increasingly at risk as the COVID-19 pandemic continues and schools experience renewed closures or pursue a hybrid model of learning (in-person and remote). From July to December 2020, 270,171 users encountered various threats disguised as popular learning platforms, an increase of 60% when compared to the first half of 2020.

The Indian edtech industry is expected to achieve a magical figure of $30 billion over the next decade, It is 40-fold jump from its current size of $700-800 million. Enterprises like Byju’s, Unacademy and UpGrad have emerged as global leaders in this space in a very short span of time. The Start-ups get millions of subscribers, billions in funding.

There are more than 1 billion schoolchildren around the globe were affected by school closures as countries attempted to slow rising infection rates. With this most of the school, college and the Universities have switched to emergency remote learning, a transition that, unfortunately, left many students and educators vulnerable to cyber risks.

Indian edtech firms expanding globally and the online education in India presents a study in rapid growth. San exprt says, the bubble is going to burst soon after the pandemic gets over. These start-ups could offer investors who enter them now huge upside potential in the years to come.

As per the report of Kaspersky. As on January 2021, the number of users encountering various threats using popular online learning platforms as a lure reached 270,171-a 60% increase when compared to the first half of 2020.

The most popular lure was, by far, Zoom. This is not surprising given that Zoom is the most popular platform for virtual meetings, with more than 300 million daily meeting participants. The second most popular was Moodle, followed by Google Meet. The number of users that encountered threats disguised as popular online learning/video conference platforms increased for all but one platform - Google Classroom.

About 98% of the threats encountered were not-a-virus, which is divided into riskware and adware. Adware bombards users with unwanted ads, while riskware consists of various files – from browser bars and download managers to remote administration tools – that may carry out various actions on your computer without your consent. Trojans made up roughly 1% of the threats encountered.

Finally, the educational institutions are the soft target of the cyber crooks, reason being many schools are struggling with a lack of budget and resources and are often forced to do more with less. Some of the security tools used in schools (and universities) are fairly dated and often not kept up to date. Hence, a lack of budget or a lower priority for security protection investments can lead to major vulnerabilities and impact a school’s ability to defend against cyber attacks and data breaches.