Why are school cyberattacks on the rise? They are easy targets for hackers

As you may know, SpaceBound Solutions cares about the security of schools and other educational institutions by utilizing our Endpoint Security and Backup and Recovery services that provide a variety of data security, backup, and recovery tasks to ensure your organizations' data stays safe. 

Why? Now more than ever, the education sector continues to be hit and usually, by hackers outside of the U.S.  As usual, ransomware - where hackers lock data up and demand payment to unlock that data is the hackers’ goal

Other attacks include something called ‘Zoombombing’ – it’s when hackers can interrupt a call - during this nightmare-of-a-call scenario, the attacker’s post pornographic images, enact DOS attacks (denial of service attacks). Their Goal?  The hackers aim to slow down the use of networks, conduct phishing and also try to access data through fake emails.

Noelle Ellerson Ng, from the School Superintendents Association said that schools are ‘low hanging fruit ‘since schools are often a community's single biggest employer - school systems store loads of data. Ng stated: ‘That makes it very, very ripe. And then you layer on the fact that the data is so sensitive and so longitudinal and so personal, and there's a huge vulnerability.’

 So, schools have measures in place to protect themselves, right? Nope – as per one cyber security expert in the article cited below: ‘even now, many school districts don't have basic prevention protocols in place.’

 What stops them you ask?  Education budgets are already tight – so money spent on preventative cyber security measures takes a hit. And, embarrassment about being hacked means many districts will keep quiet about cyberattacks.

 As one expert said:  ‘there is no fail-proof way to keep information secure – it's about putting as many layers of protection around data as possible.’ Schools need to stay vigilant and be honest about their vulnerabilities (what they don’t know) and stay focused, with a continual (while it may be stressful), sense of urgency when it comes to cyber safety

 And, yes – as we say in many of our blog posts - this is where SpaceBound Solutions comes into the picture! We help educational institutions better protect themselves.

 To learn more about what we do – check out the Managed IT Services we offer, such as Endpoint Security: https://www.spaceboundsolutions.com/ContentPage/148

 Sources on the subject above:

1. NPR article from 3/12/2024:

https://www.npr.org/2024/03/11/1236995412/cybersecurity-hackers-schools-ransomware

2. EdTech article from 3/8/2024: https://edtechmagazine.com/k12/article/2024/03/how-schools-can-increase-their-chances-winning-federal-cybersecurity-funding