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Cyber attacks on K-12 schools have increased in recent years. These attacks not only disrupt educational teaching and school operations, but also affect students, their families and teachers.
The scale and number of attacks increased during COVID-19 as more schools moved to distance learning and increased their reliance on IT services.
Today’s WatchBlog post looks at the growing risks and impacts of cyberattacks on schools, as well as our work on federal efforts to help K-12 schools.
What are the potential impacts of a cyber attack?
For our new report, we spoke with school districts and other stakeholders about the impacts cyberattacks have had on their schools, students and communities. Local and state officials told us that learning loss after a cyberattack ranged from 3 days to 3 weeks, and that recovery time could take anywhere from 2 to 9 months. The financial impacts on schools can be wide-ranging. Officials reported monetary losses to school districts ranging from $50,000 to $1 million due to costs caused by the cyber incident. These costs included, for example, replacing computer hardware and improving cyber security to prevent future attacks.
Cyber attacks can also lead to the disclosure and theft of personal information of students and school employees (as well as teachers). Schools and school districts collect and store a lot of personal information about students and employees. In the 2020 report, we found that information compromised as a result of data breaches included things like student grades, bullying reports, and Social Security numbers—leaving students vulnerable to emotional, physical, and financial harm.
How are schools attacked?
Individuals who carry out cyber attacks on schools can use several techniques. These include:
- Fishingwhich is an attempt to obtain data or other resources through fraudulent e-mail or website solicitation.
- Ransomware, which is a type of malware that tries to block access to your computer or data systems. During a ransomware attack, the perpetrator demands payment in exchange for regaining access.
- Distributed denial of service attacksthat prevent or disrupt the authorized use of networks, systems, or applications by multiple machines working together to defeat a target.
- Interrupt video conferencemeaning attacks that disrupted teleconferences and online classrooms, often with pornographic or hateful images and threatening language.
Some examples of these cyber attack methods being used on public schools include:
- In December 2021, the seller for Chicago Public Schools was the victim of a ransomware attack that exposed the personal information of more than 500,000 students and staff members. The data included student names, schools, dates of birth, gender, school ID numbers, state student ID numbers, and course information from previous school years.
- In February 2021. Winthrop Public Schools in Massachusetts was the victim of a denial-of-service attack that disrupted learning and teaching on the district’s networks and web-based systems. This included email, learning platforms and video conferencing services — all of which became essential to education during the pandemic when classes were taught remotely.
- Similarly, in September 2020. Miami-Dade County Public Schools was the victim of a series of denial of service attacks. This has disrupted learning and teaching on district networks and web-based systems.
- Connecticut officials reported that the school district had to close for 3 to 4 days due to a cyber security incident. This was followed by another incident involving a re-infection of a school district in Connecticut 2 to 3 days later. Officials said the additional attack was made possible by the school district’s cybersecurity insurance company failing to provide a sufficient recovery response.
- U Californiaofficials told us that students can get software for $30 to $50 online that would allow them to disrupt the school for 20 to 30 minutes during an attack.
Number of U.S. Students Affected by K-12 School and School District Ransomware Attacks, 2018-2021.
Listen to our recent podcast with GAO’s Dave Hinchman to learn more about the impacts of cyberattacks on K-12 public schools.
What is the role of the federal government?
There is a national strategy to combat cyberattacks led by the Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency (CISA) of the Department of Homeland Security (DHS). As part of that strategy, the Department of Education (Education) is responsible for coordinating and collaborating on K-12 public school cybersecurity efforts with other federal entities—such as the FBI and DHS—as well as state, local, and tribal entities. Education and CISA provide schools with cybersecurity-related products and services, such as online safety instruction. But beyond that, we found that these two federal entities otherwise have little or no interaction with other federal partners or the K-12 community regarding cyber attacks. This limits the federal role and ability to help schools.
We recommended that education and DHS improve their coordination, increase schools’ awareness of the federal services available to them, and measure the effectiveness of the products and services that schools use.
Learn more about cyber attacks and their impact on K-12 schools by viewing our recent report.
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