Auburn High School in Rockford, Illinois. (Auburn High School)
The school districts of Rockford, Illinois and Rockingham County, North Carolina learned some very valuable lessons in transparency and communication, timely incident response, access management, data redundancy and disaster recovery after each experienced a debilitating malware attack years ago.
Information security leaders at these two districts shared their war stories last week at the K-12 Cybersecurity Leadership Symposium, hosted by the K12 Security Information Exchange (K12 SIX) – the first-ever ISAC specifically created with local school districts in mind.
Such lessons are vital, considering what’s at stake. As part of the symposium, Doug Levin, K12 SIX national director, and president of EdTech Strategies and the K-12 Cybersecurity Resource Center, revealed troubling findings from his newly published report, “The State of K-12 Cybersecurity: 2020 Year in Review.”
According to the report, there were 408 publicly disclosed cyber incidents affecting school districts last year – 18% more than in 2019. If you account for the unknown attacks that were never reported, the true number is likely 10 to 20 times greater, Levin estimated.
“2020 didn’t happen in a vacuum… There has been a steady and alarming uptick in not only the frequency of K-12 cyber incidents but in terms of their significance and impact on students and teachers and other school community members,” said Levin. Indeed, this past year, there were at least 15 school districts across 13 states that had to closes for weeks or months due to a ransomware attack.
And despite at least one report that school attacks are trending down so far ..
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