How to Prepare Your School for a Cyberattack with Limited Resources

January 18, 2022

The Journal

With cyberattacks against K–12 schools across the United States making headlines every week, it isn’t exactly “news” that since the pandemic forced remote and digital learning to the forefront, schools are now a primary target for threat actors.

What’s perhaps surprising is how many attacks are targeting schools every hour of every day: In the last 30 days alone, for example, Microsoft has detected over 3.5 million malicious “encounters” by its devices within education organizations in the United States, according to its Global Threat Activity website.

Ransomware is increasingly targeting K–12 schools, and although many district IT budgets are growing — a Consortium for School Networking survey of K–12 IT professionals found that 56% of respondents had bigger budgets for the 2021-22 school year — cybersecurity remains the “biggest unmet technology need” by a large margin, CoSN said.