Author: Juha Haaga, Arctic Security
A university network is built to be open. Thousands of researchers, students, and collaborators need to reach in and out of it every day, often from anywhere in the world. Open-by-design is not a flaw in the architecture; it is the architecture. That single fact is why the people defending academic networks are doing a job with very little in common with defending a bank, a ministry, or industrial companies.
It is also why, in many countries, the academic CSIRT is older than the national one. These teams have been quietly holding the line for decades inside NRENs and university consortia, long before “critical infrastructure” became a policy phrase. What is changing now is not their maturity; it is the weight of what sits on top of them.
NIS2 arrived in European law with a very particular shape. Most academic CSIRTs are not themselves designated competent authorities. But the universities, research institutes, and teaching hospitals on their networks increasingly are. An NREN is now, in practice, the cybersecurity layer beneath a long list of newly in-scope organizations, each of which has obligations it did not have two years ago, and almost none of which have the staff to meet them on its own. NRENs that were originally built to move data are being asked, quietly and all at once, to help their members move to compliance. That is a new job description, and it is going to stick.
We have seen this with our customer DKCERT, the academic CSIRT that supports Danish research and education. When an academic team turns on full early-warning visibility, it almost always finds what it did not know it had. Researcher-run servers. Services set up by people who have already moved to new interests. The first useful act in defending an academic network is rarely to block something. It is to see it.
The chart above shows what that visibility reveals at a European scale: one month of cybersecurity observations across 5,095 educational institutions in 37 European countries, normalised per 10,000 tertiary students. The variation between countries is real, but the more striking finding is that every country has a footprint worth looking at.
This is also where Arctic Security’s CSIRT Development Program has found a second home. We built the program for emerging and resource-constrained national CSIRT teams, giving them the same production-grade tools their well-funded peers rely on, on terms that fit a real budget, with people alongside them to help. Academic CSIRTs share the resource constraint. They do not share the operating reality. An open network, autonomous stakeholders, and a discovery problem that never quite ends are a different terrain. Same commitment, different work.
An NREN can help assess the external perimeter of academia, but individual campuses still need their own answer to a quieter question: what data is on the internet in our name right now, and which of it is a problem? That is the job of the Arctic Early Warning Service. It expands visibility across external networks, cloud accounts, and vendors, and surfaces the handful of things that warrant attention on a given week, with improved granularity and reporting. It does not replace the work of an NREN or an academic CSIRT. It sits closer to the campus, and answers the same first question: what assets and problems do we actually have?
Although we’ve worked with NRENs and universities for several years, this is Arctic Security’s first year attending TNC and directly engaging with the whole community. We are looking forward to meeting all of you, hearing about your concerns, and discussing the realities of weaving more cybersecurity into your services.
The academic sector is not a second-class cyber defense problem. It is one of the most interesting and most important, because it sits beneath the research, science, and public trust that will shape the next decade. The teams defending it have always known that. They should not have to do it alone.
Find out more about Arctic Security’s Early Warning Service platforms and CSIRT Development Program on our website at arcticsecurity.com, or contact us at contact@arcticsecurity.com. We offer academic pricing for higher education and research institutions.
