The growing interconnectedness of the world has led to a rise in cybersecurity risks. Although it is increasingly conventional to use technology to assist business transactions, exposure to these risks must be minimised to allow business owners to do transactions in a secure manner. While a wide range of studies have been undertaken regarding the effects of cyberattacks on several industries and sectors, However, very few studies have focused on the effects of cyberattacks on the educational sector, specifically higher educational institutions (HEIs) in West Africa. Consequently, this study developed a survey and distributed it to HEIs particularly universities in West Africa to examine the data architectures they employed, the cyberattacks they encountered during the COVID-19 pandemic period, and the role of data analysis in decision-making, as well as the countermeasures employed in identifying and preventing cyberattacks. A total of one thousand, one hundred and sixty-four (1164) responses were received from ninety-three (93) HEIs and analysed. According to the study’s findings, data-informed architecture was adopted by 71.8% of HEIs, data-driven architecture by 24.1%, and data-centric architecture by 4.1%, all of which were vulnerable to cyberattacks. In addition, there are further concerns around data analysis techniques, staff training gaps, and countermeasures for cyberattacks. The study’s conclusion includes suggestions for future research topics and recommendations for repelling cyberattacks in HEIs.

The proposed research work encompasses implications for infrastructure particularly the cybersecurity as an essential in soft infrastructure, and policy making particularly on secure access management of infrastructure governance. In this study, we introduce a novel parameter focusing on the timestamp duration of password entry, enhancing the algorithm titled EPSBalgorithmv01 with seven parameters. The proposed parameter incorporates an analysis of the historical time spent by users entering their passwords, employing ARIMA for processing. To assess the efficacy of the updated algorithm, we developed a simulator and employed a multi-experimental approach. The evaluation utilized a test dataset comprising 617 authentic records from 111 individuals within a selected company spanning from 2017 to 2022. Our findings reveal significant advancements in EPSBalgorithmv01 compared to its predecessor namely EPSBalgorithmv00. While EPSBalgorithmv00 struggled with a recognition rate of 28.00% and a precision of 71.171, EPSBalgorithmv01 exhibited a recognition rate of 17% with a precision of 82.882%. Despite a decrease in recognition rate, EPSBalgorithmv01 demonstrates a notable improvement of approximately 14% over EPSBalgorithmv00.

The usage of cybersecurity is growing steadily because it is beneficial to us. When people use cybersecurity, they can easily protect their valuable data. Today, everyone is connected through the internet. It’s much easier for a thief to connect important data through cyber-attacks. Everyone needs cybersecurity to protect their precious personal data and sustainable infrastructure development in data science. However, systems protecting our data using the existing cybersecurity systems is difficult. There are different types of cybersecurity threats. It can be phishing, malware, ransomware, and so on. To prevent these attacks, people need advanced cybersecurity systems. Many software helps to prevent cyber-attacks. However, these are not able to early detect suspicious internet threat exchanges. This research used machine learning models in cybersecurity to enhance threat detection. Reducing cyberattacks internet and enhancing data protection; this system makes it possible to browse anywhere through the internet securely. The Kaggle dataset was collected to build technology to detect untrustworthy online threat exchanges early. To obtain better results and accuracy, a few pre-processing approaches were applied. Feature engineering is applied to the dataset to improve the quality of data. Ultimately, the random forest, gradient boosting, XGBoost, and Light GBM were used to achieve our goal. Random forest obtained 96% accuracy, which is the best and helpful to get a good outcome for the social development in the cybersecurity system.