Every two weeks, Keeping K-12 Cybersecure–the newsletter of the K-12 Cybersecurity Resource Center–curates the best cybersecurity and privacy news for K-12 policymakers, administrators, IT professionals, and privacy advocates. The latest edition (“Senator Schumer Calls for Reinforcements“) provides information on recent updates to the K-12 Cyber Incident Map, other additions to the Resource Center, and curated news you can use.
Here’s your reading list for articles published during the last two weeks of October 2018:
- “I’ve never had a single interaction with any of the schools my children have attended about cybersecurity,” says this Dad, who works in the industry. “Perhaps it’s time we all started paying more attention to this, because there are plenty of signs that the world of cyber crime is moving closer and closer to our children” (“Getting Serious About Security in Schools“).
- Internet-connected school surveillance cameras are controversial, especially when they include facial recognition capability. To add insult to injury: they also have a track-record of poor cybersecurity practices (“Facing Tomorrow’s High-Tech School Surveillance“).
- Joseph Cox of Motherboard reports that Remini, an app that aims to provide parents and educators with a social network to follow a child’s progress throughout school and their early life, exposed the personal information of its users to the internet writ large. The culprit: an API that let anyone pull the data without any sort of authentication (“‘Remini’ App Used by Schools Left Personal Info Open to the World“).
- Focused on cybersecurity issues in higher education (and the Chegg breach specifically), this blog by Phil HIll (“Ed Tech Cybersecurity: Suppose they gave a data breach and nobody came“) is generally applicable to K-12 incidents as well.
- I am pretty sure that the former high school teacher in the story wasn’t naked when he was doing his hacking of celebrities, but the headline for this story (“Naked celebrity photo hacker used to be a high school teacher“) is decidely ambiguous. Of note, some of his other victims included the teachers and students with whom he worked.
- Sometimes when claims of a hacked school website go viral, it is (much) less than what it seems. Skepticism matters: don’t become part of the problem!
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