{"id":175483,"date":"2026-01-07T21:43:00","date_gmt":"2026-01-08T02:43:00","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/testing.news-you-need.com\/index.php\/2026\/01\/07\/aurora-college-plans-to-increase-cyber-security-following-christmas-attack-my-north-now\/"},"modified":"2026-01-08T01:30:10","modified_gmt":"2026-01-08T06:30:10","slug":"aurora-college-plans-to-increase-cyber-security-following-christmas-attack-my-north-now","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/testing.news-you-need.com\/index.php\/2026\/01\/07\/aurora-college-plans-to-increase-cyber-security-following-christmas-attack-my-north-now\/","title":{"rendered":"Aurora College plans to increase cyber security following Christmas attack : My North Now"},"content":{"rendered":"

Aurora College plans to increase cyber security following Christmas attack : My North Now<\/a><\/p>\n

https:\/\/www.mynorthnow.com\/85054\/news\/nwt-news\/aurora-college-plans-to-increase-cyber-security-following-christmas-attack\/<\/a><\/p>\n

Publish Date: 2026-01-07 21:43:00<\/a><\/p>\n

Source Domain: www.mynorthnow.com<\/a><\/p>\n

Author: <\/a><\/p>\n

Using an unordered list, summarize the following article with between 4 and 8 key points.
\nStaff at Aurora College are working with specialists and partners to resolve the impacts of a cybersecurity attack that caused \u201cdamage\u201d to the school\u2019s online platforms over the winter break. Cyber attack experts warn that organizations of all shapes and sizes potentially face increasingly sophisticated cyber threats \u201cat scale\u201d across the country.\u00a0
\nDr. Angela James, Aurora College president said that staff at the N.W.T. college are collaborating with cybersecurity specialists and partner organizations.\u00a0James says the college\u2019s priority at this time is preventing further damage and restoring systems to so that classes can resume next week.
\n\u201cOur priority this week is preventing further damage and restoring systems to allow classes to resume January 12.\u201d<\/p>\n

Officials estimated that staff and students will be able to access to the main servers and network by the end of this week, but said the self-service portal for applications may take longer to recover. A monitoring system flagged the cyber attack that occurred despite the school\u2019s online security measures, including GNWT and College firewalls and anti-virus software.\u00a0
\n\u201cAurora College has a number of security measures, including GNWT and College firewalls and anti-virus software in place, but nothing is foolproof. The College is working with multiple partners to increase all cybersecurity measures.\u201d said James.
\nIn response to the incident, James said the college plans to increase all cybersecurity measures.
\nSchool officials said that the system could be up and running again in as early as a few days.\u201cCurrently, we believe that staff and student access to the main servers and network will be restored by the end of this week. However, some areas, such as the self-service portal for applications may take longer to bring back on line,\u201d said James.
\nTiago Henriques, a cyber security expert and head of Research at Coalition, says it\u2019s challenging to prevent cyber attacks because of the way that cyber criminals can quickly adapt their strategies using tools like AI.
\n\u201cThe evolving threat landscape just means that threat actors are always changing their tactics to maximize the financial rewards from their attacks and avoid detection,\u201d said Henriques.
\nResearchers warn that the widespread use of AI technologies by organizations has fueled the frequency and severity of cyber attacks, with AI accelerating the automation of hacking and Ransomware-as-a-Service (RaaS).
\nHenriques explained that one of the main challenges has to do with AI\u2019s ability to make cyber attacks like phishing much harder to detect.
\n\u201cWith better AI, (phishing) emails are much more coherent and specific, leveraging as much information about a person online as possible to ensure the attack is believable,\u201d Henriques cautioned.
\nAs Artificial Intelligence technologies evolve, organizations of all shapes and sizes potentially face increasingly sophisticated cyber threats \u201cat scale\u201d across the country.\u00a0
\n\u201cIt\u2019s at scale and it\u2019s a completely a numbers game. So 10,000 people can be hit at the same time,\u201d said another cyber security expert.
\nThe types of organizations being impacted by cyber threats is growing: from schools to \u2018mom-and-pop shops\u2019 to water treatment plants to hospitals.
\nWhile there isn\u2019t a \u201cfix-all solution,\u201d\u00a0 Henriques recommends five key safeguards: multi-factor authentication (MFA) on all critical accounts, using a managed detection and response (MDR) service, maintaining credible offline backups of critical business data,\u00a0 establishing a formal procedure for electronic payments and patching all software and firmware regularly.
\n\u00a0<\/p>\n

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Aurora College plans to increase cyber security following Christmas attack : My North Now https:\/\/www.mynorthnow.com\/85054\/news\/nwt-news\/aurora-college-plans-to-increase-cyber-security-following-christmas-attack\/…<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":175484,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"fifu_image_url":"https:\/\/www.mynorthnow.com\/wp-content\/uploads\/2018\/09\/Aurora-College-Yellowknife.jpg","fifu_image_alt":"","footnotes":""},"categories":[15],"tags":[26,20,24,25],"class_list":["post-175483","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-cybersecurity","tag-ai","tag-artificial-intelligence","tag-cybersecurity","tag-phishing"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/testing.news-you-need.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/175483"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/testing.news-you-need.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/testing.news-you-need.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/testing.news-you-need.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/testing.news-you-need.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=175483"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/testing.news-you-need.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/175483\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":175485,"href":"https:\/\/testing.news-you-need.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/175483\/revisions\/175485"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/testing.news-you-need.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/175484"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/testing.news-you-need.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=175483"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/testing.news-you-need.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=175483"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/testing.news-you-need.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=175483"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}