IT Outsourcing

Flashpoint Now Offering Its Cybersecurity and Risk Management Solutions to K–12 Schools

• By Kristal Kuykendall
• 06/15/22

Cybersecurity and risk intelligence firm Flashpoint today announced it is entering the K–12 sector with its comprehensive risk management and cybersecurity solutions, offering an outsourcing option to school leaders and typically under-resourced IT professionals concerned about protecting their school networks amid rising numbers of cyberattacks and ransomware incidents targeting public schools.

Flashpoint said its new offerings will provide schools and their security managers “with the intelligence and tools they need to rapidly detect, prevent, and mitigate a variety of cyber and physical threats.”

The company’s website also debuted a “case study” describing how it is already serving one of the nation’s largest school districts, which it did not name.

Flashpoint said its K–12 solutions, available immediately, include:

• Ransomware readiness and response: If a school is the victim of cyber extortion, Flashpoint helps the school leaders quickly determine the extent of the attack, launch an incident response plan, and then mitigate the impact on the school’s networks and data. Readiness efforts would include consulting on response plans and policies as well as incident response testing, according to the news release. The company will “also work with schools to develop contingencies in the event of an attack, including establishing a process to ensure payments can be made securely and quickly,” according to Flashpoint’s announcement.
• Brand exposure protection and domain monitoring: K–12 schools can use Flashpoint technology to identify fake or duplicate social media accounts, which cybersecurity experts have warned is a frequent tactic by threat actors. This service also includes monitoring for such threats as typosquatting and assistance with taking action using takedown services, according to the news release. The Flashpoint Intelligence Platform also can monitor for brand impersonation through logo detection using Optical-Character Recognition and machine-learning technology, the company said.
• Preventing account takeover (ATO): The Flashpoint Intelligence Platform enables school IT teams to identify school email credentials that have been exposed, and determine whether they’re being shared or sold such as on the dark web, the company said. The solution enables automation and simplification of account flagging, password resets, and permission-restricting.
• Coordination with law enforcement: Flashpoint can help schools build plans and procedures into its cybersecurity program including when and how to involve law enforcement for the most efficient and impactful response against a threat actor.
• Threat actor monitoring and intelligence: This option monitors for and identifies threat actors who are actively leveraging a school’s stolen data or are involved in malicious activity against assets, personnel, or a community. “We help risk management and security teams understand the most important context surrounding threat actors, including affiliates, history, and tactics, techniques, and procedures (TTPs), which can lead to DDoS attacks, business email compromise scams, and other potentially detrimental schemes,” Flashpoint said in the news release. “Schools can set up custom alerts, prioritize remediation efforts, escalate issues in a timely fashion, and prepare for the future.”
• Vulnerability intelligence and prioritization: This solution provides comprehensive vulnerability intelligence, including “more than 93,000 vulnerabilities that cannot be found in the CVE and NVD.” Flashpoint said its VulnDB software alerts schools to “newly disclosed vulnerabilities in their software ecosystem an average of two weeks faster than the public source.”

Learn more by emailing [email protected] or at Flashpoint’s website.