A data breach by the Texas Association of School Boards (TASB) offers a cautionary tale about how K-12 school districts and their vendors should communicate the (bad) news to stakeholders.
There Can Be No Privacy without Security
If there is an Achilles’ heel to a future of robust personalized learning for all K-12 students, it is the uneven attention to the cybersecurity risks facing school information technology assets and data. In this post, I offer emerging lessons about real and perceived information security issues facing schools from the data underlying the K-12 Cyber Incident Map.
Should We Be Sending Students Who Hack Their Schools to Jail?
Since 2016, multiple news reports document that K-12 students are being charged with and convicted of crimes for hacking their schools. In other cases, these incidents have led to students being expelled. Are schools and the police over-reacting to student hacking of schools? Are our current laws and school policies appropriate? It may be time for a hard look at these questions.
Introducing the K-12 Cyber Incident Map
Today, I am pleased to introduce and launch the “K-12 Cyber Incident Map.” It is a visualization of cybersecurity-related incidents reported about U.S. K-12 public schools and districts from 2016 to the present. Painstakingly assembled from public reports, it was created to begin to build a data-based awareness of the scope and variety of digital security and privacy threats facing K-12 public schools and districts, as well as to shed a light on the need for uniform standards for disclosing cyber incidents affecting schools, students, and educators.