Best Practices for Strengthening Your School's Cybersecurity

With the new 2023-2024 school year about to commence, school districts have the prime opportunity to beef up their security after the alarmingly large number of high-profile cybersecurity attacks on schools seen in the headlines recently.

Since the pandemic, the amount of school issued laptops and computers has erupted. Schools are integrating technology into classrooms and leveraging online platforms for learning, all while holding on to vast amounts of sensitive student and teacher data. This includes confidential student records and faculty information, as well as financial data. This makes it wholly tempting for hackers to access this information in one go, potentially selling it, or holding it for ransom.

Attacks Against School Networks Are on the Rise

At the beginning of the 2022-2023 school year, hackers targeted the second largest US school district with over 600,000 students. The district, Los Angeles Unified, is reported to have suffered ‘significant infrastructure disruption,’ which in some cases can lead to delays or closures within schools. Thankfully, the hackers did not target the student’s personal information.

Oftentimes, however, that is not the case. Earlier this year a New York City school district was breached, compromising an estimated 45,000 students' data. In some cases, this included social security numbers and financial information.

Another danger of this is that a child’s identity could be stolen, which may go unnoticed until they try to open a bank account when they’re older and discover that someone has ruined their credit, and possibly their reputation.

Bad Actors Have Many Tactics

There are many ways these breaches can occur, from the most common, a data breach — at 36% in 2020 according to a K-12 Cybersecurity review — to ransomware attacks, phishing scams, and even insider threats. All of these have an increase in risk due to inadequate cybersecurity awareness amongst the school districts.

These problems are growing, and are largely new for many school administrators, which makes it even harder to stress the importance of cybersecurity awareness and education amongst the students and teachers.

A Simple Phishing Attack Could Cripple an Entire System

Unfortunately, as cybersecurity increases in school districts, hackers become more clever as well. The importance of staying current and active in combating these risks is massive, and involves many steps and checks in place to prevent this from happening. A critical and ongoing best practice is security training, as social engineering (such as phishing attacks) can be used to evade technology and create breaches from staff members thinking they are clicking on a legitimate link.

It Is Important to Incorporate a Variety of Tools and Best Practices, Such as the Following:

UncommonX Helps Schools Protect Their Environments

All of these items are part of the security software and solutions provided by UncommonX. Dozens of school districts use the comprehensive features of our software and managed services to protect their students, staff, and technology environments from bad actors that can cause downtime, data loss, and costs related to ransom and remediation.

In every case, we encourage schools to adopt a plan and execute regular tests, updates, and improvements. To learn more about our approach and the value UncommonX provides to school districts, please see our latest X Factor File list featuring two school districts that created a safe, secure, and resilient environment with UncommonX. If you have interest in adopting our solution for your own district, please contact us at hello@uncommonx.com.

Learn more about UncommonX SOC and our broad set of expert services today.