Are ransomware attacks the new snow days?

Key points:

In early January, the Des Moines Public Schools, the largest school district in the state of Iowa, fell victim to a ransomware attack that forced the district to take its network offline and students to miss more instructional time.

In addition to the disruption to operations, the district discovered that the attackers compromised the personal data of nearly 7,000 individuals, putting them at increased risk of identity theft and other crimes.

This is just one attack among hundreds as ransomware gangs relentlessly target the education sector. Disruptive ransomware attacks against the education sector have become so commonplace that they are likely to cause more school closures than weather-related incidents.

In fact, the number of attacks against schools is so high that the month of June was on pace to go down in the record books for the highest volume of disclosed attacks against education organizations to date.

A problem with few solutions

The Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency (CISA), which oversees protecting government agencies and our nation’s critical infrastructure, recently issued an alert about the growing risk to the education sector from ransomware attacks.