What Is Backup as a Service (BaaS), and Should K–12 Schools Consider It?

Reuters:
Australia’s biggest health insurer Medibank says an October 2022 hack compromised personal and “significant amounts” of health claims data of its ~4M customers  —  Medibank Private Ltd (MPL.AX), Australia’s biggest health insurer, said on Wednesday a cyber hack had compromised …

For the past two years, ransomware attacks have been on the rise in K–12, and districts are struggling to keep up. Ransomware can be debilitating to districts and can impact the availability of services to educate students. Ransomware encrypts targeted systems, rendering files and applications useless. Having encrypted a district’s data, cybercriminals demand a ransom to decrypt the files. In the past, that would have been the end of the attack. The school could choose to pay and retrieve the data or not.
Now, K–12 institutions have better backup and recovery mechanisms in place. It takes…

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.

Birgit Mitwollen / Reuters:
German media reports the government plans to dismiss cybersecurity chief Arne Schoenbohm over possible contacts with Russian security services  —  German Interior Minister Nancy Faeser wants to dismiss the country’s cybersecurity chief due to possible contacts with people involved …

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.