According to the nonprofit Consortium for School Networking (CoSN), cybersecurity remains the single-most important initiative for public and private school technology officers, yet IT departments represent less than five percent of the overall budget at more than 60 percent of districts.
Today’s digital age allows independent schools to transition from traditional paper-based record-keeping to computerized systems. While automation benefits educators with easier and faster experiences, it also introduces new challenges to protecting valuable school information.
With the associated risks to student and family privacy, parent and guardian trust, teacher productivity, and school reputation, administrators must adopt strong cybersecurity protocols. Luckily, these are achievable with the knowledge of typical cyberattack methods, why hackers target schools, and how to best protect your institution against bad actors.
Top 3 Most Common Cyberattack Methods on Schools
Hackers use several strategies to compromise school networks and data. Identifying them is the first proactive step toward prevention.
- Ransomware: A ransomware attack occurs when hackers overtake a network and its resources until the target pays a specified amount. K-12 and college institutions are a common focus of these attacks, with a record-breaking 120 incidents over the course of 2023, reinforcing the importance of private schools adopting technology with cybersecurity at the forefront.
- Phishing: This event happens when bad actors trick users by posing as a legitimate individual or entity, offering a malicious link. Often conducted over email and text, opening the link grants attackers access to the school’s IT systems.
- Denial of Service (DoS): DoS attacks disrupt authorized user access to resources by overwhelming the system with traffic. These attacks commonly target government entities, so even private schools need to prepare to experience downstream effects if government partners are compromised.
Why Hackers Target Educational Institutions
Hackers target K-12 organizations for several key reasons.
Valuable Information
Schools capture and store vast amounts of data, much of it sensitive. This data can range from personally identifying information to employment and financial records. Even if hackers can’t access highly encrypted data, they often discover routine information that can support future cyberattack efforts on your community.
Admissions and student management systems are appealing targets since they contain so much sensitive data.
Multiple Users and Devices
Educational institutions have a unique and dynamic group of end users. Cybersecurity awareness differs among students, families, and staff, and these groups frequently change due to situations such as employee turnover or family relocations.
In addition, your technology users often rely on different digital devices to access institutional resources. This is especially true during the application and admissions process, and schools rarely have control over the security features of these personal devices. A device or network vulnerability on the user’s end can easily allow a bad actor to gain entry.
After-School Access
Students, staff, and teachers frequently use their devices (which may include your private school’s technology) outside of the classroom, logging into home or public networks in the process. These networks typically do not have the same level of security as your school’s Wi-Fi. An unsecured network translates into an increased chance of piggybacking, which is when a threat actor gains undetected entry through a legitimate user session.
Trusted Email Extensions
Email is the most common phishing method because hackers can easily get their hands on reputable email addresses. Schools often have .edu or .org domain extensions because they immediately convey a sense of trust. When a threat actor copies these email addresses, recipients generally see them as credible.
As a result, students and families are more likely to respond to information requests that seem like they came from school personnel. Similarly, teachers and staff may download dangerous files containing malware if the phishing email impersonates an administrator.
How to Protect Your Private School Technology from Hackers
Your school can implement the following measures to support your efforts to protect student data and resources to the utmost.
Improve IT Scalability
With cybersecurity such a high priority for technology officers, providing more resources for IT teams allows them to expand their impact exponentially. Even with just more effective policies and outside-the-box thinking, your teams can do more with their budgets.
Here are some methods and objectives to support IT teams.
- Automate account provisioning and access governance. As new employees onboard or job descriptions update, access to company software will change. Automating account creation, deletion, and level of permission both eases the IT teams’ burden and maintains data and system security.
- Respond to tickets faster. Whether through additional headcount or automation, bolstering how quickly IT support can troubleshoot tickets both leaves your school less vulnerable to cyberattacks and prevents backlogs that affect student experiences.
- Adopt tech backed by industry-leading compliance. Go with private school technology that adheres to some of the highest standards applicable to education settings, including PCI 4.0 for data security.
Invest in Cybersecurity Awareness Training Programs
The people who make up your school, both staff and students, are the first line of defense in cybersecurity, yet many schools do not offer account protection education for them. In that same report from the CoSN, 33 percent of respondents said they provide no training to students. This same study found that 13 percent of teachers, 14 percent of support staff, and 12 percent of administrators also do not receive training.
These gaps represent a significant opportunity to strengthen awareness among the majority of users at your private school. Technology solutions like awareness programs and phishing experiments can help your school identify those most in need of additional support. On-demand training is also an excellent option with self-paced modules that users must complete by a specific due date. For younger students, cybersecurity basics should be added to their curriculum to set best practices at an early age.
Develop Comprehensive Password Policies
End users have a lot of passwords to remember, which means they’re more likely to use similar ones across platforms, choose something easy to remember, or even write their passwords down. For higher security, your school can implement a thorough policy that includes the following strategies:
- Password changes at random frequencies
- Inability to reuse passwords
- Mandatory changing of default passwords at the first login
- Password management software capable of securely storing password information while automatically rejecting passwords that are frequently compromised
- Complex password configurations, such as requiring a special character, number, and mix of cases
Enforce Best Practices for Resource Access
Even the best prevention strategies are no guarantee to completely prevent attacks. Improving your school’s cybersecurity monitoring and response strategies directly impacts your ability to identify and eliminate attacks that do emerge.
- Improve threat visibility. Continuously monitor systems for suspicious activity and have a plan-of-action to respond to different scenarios that may arise. This is done through a combination of security operations technology and human vigilance to identify and strengthen security weak points.
- Have a responsive threat reaction. Even a proactive approach to cybersecurity does not always prevent attacks. Ensure all stakeholders know the roles, responsibilities, and procedures required of them in the event of an attack.
- Limit administrative credentials. Once a hacker gains access to your school’s system, high-level administrative and elevated-permission accounts frequently become their next targets, as these grant access to nearly all available data and operations. Ensuring there are a limited number of accounts with access to high-value resources and sensitive data helps minimize this risk.
Role-based access control (RBAC) is one effective way to restrict access based on the user’s role in your network. For example, you can create one default set of privileges for families, one for students, and so on. RBAC strengthens cybersecurity for schools by ensuring end users can only log into certain resources, reducing the potential risk of sensitive information access.
Update Your Private School’s Technology
Many private schools operate on legacy systems, and these often have vulnerabilities hackers can more easily exploit. An investment in digital transformation modernizes your tools alongside stronger security that can keep pace with hackers. Take the following supplementary actions to help ensure better protection for your school.
- Configure firewalls for allowlists. This includes known safe devices, emails, IP addresses or domain names, and applications. Create blocklists that prevent access to those known to be unsafe.
- Enable automatic security updates where applicable.
- Mandate multifactor authentication (MFA) for resource access.
- Invest in network analysis and monitoring designed to reveal vulnerabilities and detect intruders.
- Install any manual security patches or updates as soon as they’re received.
- Confirm all school-owned devices are running the latest operating systems.
Take a Step Toward Better Digital Asset Protection Today
Private schools with effective technology solutions can gain greater confidence in their cybersecurity measures, in addition to more efficient and easier student management. Ravenna streamlines workflows and offers dependable uptime secured by industry-proven encryption, monitoring, and advanced safeguarding approaches.
