IT Experts Reveal Critical Incident Response Best Practices for K–12

In K–12, cybercrime is a constant threat. Every day, school IT teams face and work to defend against cyber breaches. This makes cybersecurity critical.
“We see thousands of attacks of all kinds yearly,” said one respondent in the State Educational Technology Directors Association’s “2022 State EdTech Trends Report.” “In 2021, we had nearly 1,000 distributed denial of service attempts alone.”
However, not all schools are ready to respond effectively. District Administration and Education Networks of America recently surveyed 280 K–12 administrators and educators. Of those whose districts…

Sergiu Gatlan / BleepingComputer:
Rackspace confirms a ransomware attack caused an ongoing outage to its hosted Microsoft Exchange services, but its other products are fully operational  —  Texas-based cloud computing provider Rackspace has confirmed today that a ransomware attack is behind its ongoing Hosted Exchange outage.

Nilay Patel / The Verge:
Q&A with the CEO of Clearwater Compliance, a health care-focused cybersecurity firm, on HIPAA, ransomware attacks, medical IoT device vulnerabilities, and more  —  Ransomware attacks still plague our healthcare system.  Steve Cagle’s cybersecurity company is trying to prevent them.

Along with a rise in ransomware attacks and phishing scams, school districts are facing a new threat: distributed denial of service (DDoS) attacks. These cyberthreats halt districts’ ability to perform functions online by flooding the target systems with a high volume of requests simultaneously. In an age where schools rely on the internet for everything from teaching and attendance taking to managing school lunches, these shutdowns can cause major disruptions.
While in some instances the disruption is perpetrated by professional threat actors, schools are increasingly finding their own …