A ransomware attack that knocked the Baltimore County Public Schools (BCPS) system offline for several days last week focused attention on the heightened threat activity directed at school networks since the pandemic forced a mass shift to distance learning this year.
A new report from Armis this week suggests that many schools may be making it easier for threat actors to execute such attacks by allowing numerous devices to connect to their network in an insecure and unmanaged fashion.
Armis' report is based on recent engagements with multiple K–12 school districts around the country. In many instances, the vendor found a larger-than-expected and more-varied collection of unmanaged devices connected to the school networks.
One Arizona K–12 school district, for instance, had at least 47 videogame consoles, five Wi-Fi Pineapple devices, and three rogue access points on its network. Armis discovered many of the consoles were exposing the school district's network to the gaming community. The devices belonged to both students and faculty and presented a major risk because they're relatively easily exploitable if the Universal Plug and Play protocol is enabled on the gaming console, says Curtis Simpson, CISO at Armis.
The Wi-Fi Pineapples and other devices on the network similarly exposed the school district to a wide variety of external threats.
In another school district, Armis discovered as many as 239 connected building automation systems that all had a set of vulnerabilities, collectively referred to as URGENT/11, in them. The remotely exploitable vulnerabilities, which Armi ..
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