This month, thousands of students finally returned to school classrooms. That’s the good news. The bad news? Ransomware has also gone back to school and is already causing trouble.
The Los Angeles Unified School District was recently attacked, resulting in significant disruptions to daily activities. It was the 50th such assault this year on the U.S. education sector. A separate ransomware attack in January forced the Albuquerque, New Mexico, public school system to close for two days, after the hack crippled systems that host information on emergency contacts for students and adults.
Schools with limited cybersecurity resources are often the most vulnerable to ransomware, and in this time of shrinking education budgets, the description applies to most schools in the country. Does it apply to yours?
What Can Be Done?
Schools can upgrade security to avoid a repeat occurrence, but after an attack the damage has already been done. The goal is to take steps to prevent the next one before you have to contact law enforcement – and angry parents; before you can’t initiate automated paycheck distribution; before you face a decision about paying thousands of dollars to regain access to your website or risk data exposure.
Honor Roll Websites
If you haven’t been hit yet, now is the time to act. Our Honor Roll school website program has protocols in place to deliver the security schools need, so administrators can focus on the day-to-day challenges of running their schools.
With Honor Roll you’ll receive the convenience and cost-savings advantages of our website platform, as well as state-of-the-art data protection. These websites offer a wealth of benefits to schools and school districts of all sizes and types. You can get the details on why they have been so successful here.
Privacy Protection for Teachers, Administrators, Students
One of the most damaging consequences of a school ransomware attack is having the private information of all those who work at or attend that school becoming accessible online. For more than ten years, 360Civic has been at the forefront of enforcing the laws meant to protect your private information. Our dedicated security team uses our proprietary IronWall360 technology to scan the internet every day, and when we find the address or phone number of someone under our protection, we make sure the website removes that content. It’s not a request – we don’t give them a choice.
We have found and removed more than one million listings of addresses and phone numbers for those enrolled in our program, including judges and police officers.
Is your information online now? We can run a free, no-obligation privacy report on you or your child to find out.
