Quantifying Cybersecurity Risk in Alumni CRM Systems

The digital nature of customer relationship management (CRM) systems at higher education institutions makes them vulnerable to increasing cybersecurity threats because they depend on them for managing relations and fundraising activities. The research develops a Monte Carlo simulation framework to analyze how phishing attacks, data breaches, and ransomware threats affect the alumni databases of a medium-sized public university. Using random inputs, the model creates simulated scenarios for occurrence rates, detection, recovery, data, trust, and penalties. The simulation model assesses operational disruptions and financial losses while evaluating short-term relational impacts on donor engagement and alumni participation. It generates predicted system downtime…