Wednesday, August 7, 2019

Not just Capital One, Equifax: Data breaches at school, risking your family's security

Data breach, cyber attack: Hackers use ransomware, phishing on schools

Not just Capital One, Equifax: Data breaches at school, risking your family's security

ROCHESTER, N.Y. – Look at school districts from the perspective of a hacker.
Districts maintain reams of sensitive information about employees, students and families, all of it online and accessible to varying degrees to hundreds or thousands of employees – not all of whom were paying particularly close attention in this year's mandatory cybersecurity webinar. With annual budgets in the tens or hundreds of millions, their pockets are deep, at least in theory, for the purposes of paying ransom.
And they can't very well afford not to retrieve their data.

"On the list of things that keep me up at night, it’s a high one," said John Miller, director of technology, data and program evaluation at the Hilton Central School District, about 20 miles north of Rochester, New York.
"If you ask any tech-related person in the field, they’ll tell you the same thing. … None of us want this to happen to us."
More than 100 American school districts reported cyberattacks in 2018, likely a significant undercount of an inherently sensitive event.
In western New York, for instance, the Syracuse City School District and Onondaga CONTINUE READING: Data breach, cyber attack: Hackers use ransomware, phishing on schools

Parent Coalition for Student Privacy - https://www.studentprivacymatters.org/

Parent Coalition for Student Privacy