In September 2020, a ransomware attack forced 6,000 elementary students to shutdown learning at the Newhall School District. Newhall isn't alone. In addition, Harford Public School, Miami Dade County, Haywood County School district in North Carolina are others that experienced similar circumstances. With ransomware surging nearly 110% and no end in sight for remote learning, the environment is ripe for cyberattacks to escalate. To get some insight, we spoke to Dmitriy Ayrapetov, Vice President of Platform Architecture at SonicWall.
New Navigate360 and Zogby Strategies Safety and Wellbeing Poll shows growing teen anxiety brought on by the Covid-19 pandemic and its impact on America’s economy, culture, and daily life
January 14, 2021
Only 55% of teens believe that school leaders thought safety was a priority and only 42% thought schools are spending enough time and money to keep students safe, according to a survey conducted by Navigate360 and John Zogby Strategies.
COVID-19 has caused havoc on the schools across the U.S. In the spring, school districts did whatever they could to provide the tools to students to get through the end of the school year. As schools are starting up around the country this month and next month, the challenge school IT departments are having is how to secure all of the devices distributed to students. Here, we talk to Jake Kouns, CEO and CISO for Risk Based Security, where he leads the company’s technology strategy and is responsible for product vision and leadership in the security industry.
CISA, MITRE, and GMU collaborated to explore and analyze current and evolving security procedures and technologies to improve school security—primarily against active assailants
December 15, 2020
The Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency (CISA) released a report from a School Security Simulation Experiment (SIMEX) focused on current security procedures and technologies to improve both physical and operational security in K-12 schools. The two-week SIMEX, conducted jointly with MITRE and George Mason University in August, served as a pilot to determine whether a SIMEX is a viable tool that can be used to evaluate policies, technologies, and procedures related to school safety in the future.
The town of Oxford, Connecticut and its public schools will receive a grant from the U.S. Department of Justice, Community Oriented Policing Services to create a security operations center (SOC) with three personnel monitoring the district's four school campuses.
A new Joint Cybersecurity Advisory, coauthored by the Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI), the Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency (CISA), and the Multi-State Information Sharing and Analysis Center (MS-ISAC), assess malicious cyber actors are targeting kindergarten through twelfth grade (K-12) educational institutions, leading to ransomware attacks, the theft of data, and the disruption of distance learning services.
489 Virginia-area schools in 102 school divisions will share $12 million in security grant funding from the state's department of education. The grants will include monies for video monitoring systems, voice and video internal communications systems, school bus interior cameras, mass notification systems, visitor-identification systems, access control systems, two-way radios, security vestibules and other security upgrades.
The past couple of weeks, K-12 schools were hit hard with ransomware attacks. This week follows a tumultuous fall, full of cyber breaches and ransomware attacks that have hit schools across the U.S. and it has garnered government attention.