Schools are high-value targets. Know what's exposed.
FortWatch scans your LMS platforms, student portals, and campus infrastructure with 11 automated scanners. Find CVEs, open ports, weak encryption, and exposed files. Protect student data without a dedicated security team.
Built for Education IT
FERPA Compliance Evidence
SSL/TLS audits, vulnerability scans, and security header checks generate evidence that demonstrates technical safeguards for student education records. Export results for compliance reviews.
LMS Platform Scanning
Nuclei CVE scans detect known vulnerabilities in Canvas, Moodle, Blackboard, and other LMS platforms. Sensitive file detection finds exposed grade exports, roster files, and admin endpoints.
Campus Network Scanning
Nmap port scanning maps open services across campus servers, research systems, and administrative infrastructure. Detect unnecessary exposed ports and outdated services before they become entry points.
Research Data Protection
Cloud bucket scanning checks S3, Azure, and GCP storage for publicly accessible research datasets, grant documents, and institutional files. Sensitive file detection catches exposed backups and config files.
Subdomain and Phishing Detection
Subdomain takeover detection catches abandoned department sites and lab pages. Brand monitoring finds phishing domains targeting students and faculty with fake login pages.
AI-Prioritized Remediation
AI ranks findings by severity and exploitability so resource-constrained IT teams fix the most dangerous vulnerabilities first. Step-by-step remediation guidance -- no security expertise required.
Secure Your Institution in Four Steps
Add Your Assets
Enter LMS domains, student portal URLs, and campus server IPs. Two-minute setup.
Run 11 Scanners
CVE detection, port scanning, SSL audits, cloud checks, and sensitive file discovery run automatically.
Remediate with Guidance
AI prioritizes findings. Step-by-step remediation instructions your IT team can follow immediately.
Monitor Continuously
Ongoing scanning catches new vulnerabilities as your infrastructure changes. FERPA evidence stays current.
External Attack Surface Management for Schools, Colleges, and Universities
Education runs one of the most decentralized public footprints of any sector. A single district or university exposes an LMS (Canvas, Moodle, Blackboard, Schoology), a student information system portal (Banner, PowerSchool, Workday Student, Ellucian), single sign-on and identity endpoints (Shibboleth, ADFS, Google Workspace/Microsoft 365 federation), payment pages for tuition, athletics, and bookstores, and a long tail of department, lab, club, and faculty subdomains that IT never centrally provisioned. Every one of those is internet-facing, and most institutions have no complete inventory of what they actually run.
The threats that hit this surface are concrete. Subdomain takeover is rampant in higher ed because course sites, conference microsites, and graduated-student projects get spun up on Heroku, GitHub Pages, AWS, and Azure, then abandoned with the DNS record still pointing at the deprovisioned host. Credential phishing is the dominant entry vector: lookalike domains and fake SSO login pages harvest student and faculty credentials, which then unlock email, financial aid records, and grade systems. Legacy and unpatched web apps are everywhere because budgets are thin and a professor's research portal or a 2014 PHP department site never gets decommissioned. Exposed sensitive files (.env, .git, database backups, grade and roster exports) and misconfigured public cloud buckets holding research datasets or admissions records round out the pattern.
What external scanning can and cannot see matters here. FortWatch maps the public attack surface: open ports, known CVEs, weak TLS, missing security headers, dangling DNS and takeover-able subdomains, exposed files, public buckets, and phishing/typosquat domains. It does not see inside your SIS database, it cannot evaluate who in the registrar's office has access to a student's record, and it is not a substitute for a penetration test, internal segmentation, or staff phishing training. It tells you what an attacker can reach from the outside before they do — which, for a sprawling and under-staffed education estate, is exactly the blind spot that gets institutions breached.
Compliance this supports
How continuous external scanning maps to the frameworks teams in this sector report against.
FERPA requires reasonable methods to protect student education records but prescribes no specific technical controls; continuous external scanning produces dated evidence that public-facing systems handling records are hardened (TLS, patched CVEs, no exposed files).
A mid-sized university's marketing team launches a conference microsite on a cloud platform under events.university.edu, then tears down the hosting account after the event but leaves the DNS CNAME in place. Eight months later an attacker finds the dangling record, re-registers the now-free cloud resource, and serves their own content from a legitimate .edu subdomain. They stand up a pixel-perfect copy of the university's SSO login page and email it to students as an enrollment-deadline notice. Because the link is a real university subdomain with a valid certificate, it sails past suspicion and email filters, and dozens of students enter credentials — which the attacker replays against the financial aid portal. FortWatch's subdomain-takeover scanner would have flagged the dangling events.university.edu record as critical the first time it ran after the microsite came down, and brand monitoring would have surfaced the lookalike login page, closing the gap before a single credential was lost.
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