LMS Development

LMS Security Issues and Things to Consider

Interactive and web based training courses are gaining much popularity. Various educational tools are now implemented in varied corporate enterprises and organizations to conduct their training courses. Learning management system, especially the corporate trainings often contain sensitive information that we need to keep safe and secured. For example, sharing employee data or some production secrets to external people are not allowed, especially when they are working for a competitor.

To meet this challenge, commercial vendors are responding to various web based testing programs for all levels that cater to the prime areas of security. Moodle is a LMS that is specially designed for developing high quality online courses and offers a number of functions and modules to modify the system specific study program characteristics. Despite the advent of strong functions, your competitors could sneak into your system and modify or steal some of your learning materials. To fight these kinds of cyber threat, it is very important to understand the kind of vulnerabilities that your system has and also start highlighting the delicate spots of your LMS.

Why security in LMS is crucial?

It is true that most of the leading LMSs have great security practices. They use SSL, secure back-end infrastructure, adhere to the certifications and also get security audits done. But in spite of these, data breaches still continue and attackers still break into the system to access sensitive data and user account information. The main problem is that users are too casual about the security issues and often don’t listen to the training and don’t use a password manager. Extremely poor password choices often make the system vulnerable.

Security is not a feature, it is basically a process and there are some features that a Learning Management System should have in order to be secure. Here are some of the spots in your LMS that are most vulnerable and should be highly secured.

Initial contact: When a person wants to access your training material, the first step to access the content is to have a login into your portal and it is important to ensure that it is extremely complicated to steal the user id or even hack the access point.

Segmentation: Segmenting your data based on the sensitivity of the data is important, and so there should be few sections having restricted access. Therefore, it is important that only those people having the right credentials can have access to those sections containing important documents or data.

Verification: Gaining access to the platform is the first step and ensure that the user who is logging in is exactly the same person who he claims to be so that the person doesn’t steal and use someone else’s credentials.

Integrity: It is very important that everyone doesn’t have the access to write on your training materials. So, to keep the system safe, ensure that only those people can modify the content of the LMS who are actually intended to do so.


Some important features that can help cyber attackers away:

SSL certification: The SSL protocol always encrypts the data that is transmitted so that only the end users logged can read it. SSL support offers e-learning services in a safe and encrypted environment that prevents other users in the same network to read the data and passwords.

Password: A good password policy that includes a combination of characters and numbers can make it stronger. Reminding the users not to use simple passwords for the account details page helps.

Signup: For extra safety, your signup process should demand email verification, enabling captcha and etc. The administrator can easily restrict certain email domains of their employees.

Technology is now there to solve security issues and protect the data in an LMS from cyber attackers. But it is important to give attention to the implementation of the controls and design the process so that unauthorized access can be restricted.

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