The 2020–2021 academic year started not with a bang but with a whimper for some school districts as, instead of welcoming students back to class (albeit virtual classrooms), they found themselves scrambling to combat everything from ransomware to distributed denial-of-service (DDoS) attacks. To wit:
Schools in Haywood County, NC, were shut down for several days when the school district fell victim to a ransomware attack that required it to rebuild the entire network and related technology services.
Las Vegas' Clark County School District was infected by ransomware that breached the personally identifiable information (PII), including Social Security numbers, of former and current employees.
Miami-Dade County Public Schools experienced significant disruptions over the first three days of distance learning, thanks to a series of DDoS attacks allegedly perpetrated by a 16-year-old student. This was not the school district's first rodeo, either — the school system noted it had already experienced more than a dozen DDoS attacks since the start of the school year by the time the student-hacker was arrested.
Sandwich Public Schools in Massachusetts were knocked offline by what was initially thought to be a firewall failure but was later discovered to be the result of a DDoS attack. Tyngsboro middle and high schools also came under fire from a DDoS attack initiated by a device brought onto one of the schools' campuses every morning.
While a boon to the ability to educate student ..
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