As ransomware attacks targeting the education sector grab more headlines every week, a new ruling from a federal appeals court has further lowered the bar for people whose data is breached and leaked on the dark web to sue the organizations where the data was compromised, and educational institutions, public schools, and ed tech providers should take heed, an expert warns.
- By Kristal Kuykendall
- 09/27/22
Cyber Security Works, an IT risk management company and partner agency of the U.S. Department of Homeland Security, recently conducted an assessment of an entire state’s public education system, analyzing the security posture across 180 school districts and charter schools, and it found 2,221 potential IT security problems, including scores of vulnerabilities known to have been weaponized by cyber criminals.
- By Kristal Kuykendall
- 09/22/22
An updated list of all K–12 schools in the U.S. known to have been impacted by the breach of student data resulting from a cyberattack on Illuminate Education's systems in January 2022.
- By Kristal Kuykendall
- 09/19/22
A longtime technology professional specializing in data protection and disaster recovery shares four types of tools every K-12 school district should be using to bolster their data protection systems and boost their cybersecurity resilience.
New details about the Labor Day weekend ransomware attack on Los Angeles Unified School District have trickled out over the past week, indicating that district officials may be negotiating with the threat actors to preserve district data stolen during the incident — and that they are definitely diving into major IT and cybersecurity upgrades.
- By Kristal Kuykendall
- 09/14/22
The U.S. Department of Education is accepting applications through Oct. 3, 2022, for its Project Prevent Grant Program, which will award $6.8 million to about a dozen local educational agencies impacted by community violence to “expand their capacity to implement community- and school-based strategies to help prevent community violence and mitigate the impacts of exposure to community violence.”
- By Kristal Kuykendall
- 09/12/22
Though Los Angeles Unified School District leaders framed last weekend's ransomware attack and response as "unprecedented," cybersecurity research shows the only things "unprecedented" were the immediate federal assistance LAUSD received in mitigating the damage and the international press attention — most districts have to fend for themselves, and experts say it's long past time for federal lawmakers to institute real change.
- By Kristal Kuykendall
- 09/08/22
A new report shines a stark light on the state of education technology in the United States. Among the findings: There's inadequate funding for information security and ineffective use of technology tools in schools, at least from the perspective of state education leaders, according to a new report issued today by the State Educational Technology Director's Association (SETDA) in collaboration with Whiteboard Advisors.
A ransomware attack over Labor Day weekend brought to a standstill the online systems of Los Angeles Unified School District, the second-largest K–12 district in the country with about 640,000 students, LAUSD officials confirmed this morning in a statement on its website.
- By Kristal Kuykendall
- 09/06/22
A joint Cybersecurity Advisory released today by the FBI, Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency, and Multi-State Information Sharing and Analysis Center — as those agencies help investigate the Labor Day weekend ransomware attack on Los Angeles Unified School District — warns that Vice Society threat actors are disproportionately targeting the education sector as recently as this month.
- By Kristal Kuykendall
- 09/06/22