Back-to-School K–12 Cybersecurity Tips

With the summer holidays ending, students are set to return to K–12 schools nationwide. While students will just be starting classes, school district IT staff, including technology directors and system admins, have been busy preparing. Devices must be issued to students and staff and set up.  New user accounts must be set up and software pre-installed. Unexpected problems must be troubleshot. As old networks strain under the influx of new users and devices, IT staff must now also address the growing threat of cyberattacks. In this blog, we’ll cover some key school cybersecurity tips for IT staff to bear in mind during the back-to-school rush.

Know Your Enemy: Why Threat Actors Target Schools

Students’ data is valuable. Threat actors will look to resell credentials online. For one thing, children haven’t had the opportunity to tarnish their credit ratings. More importantly, a 12-year-old student might not check their credit rating until their 20s. The identity thief therefore has almost 10 years with which to open new accounts and commit fraudulent purchases.

Additionally, the public funding available to schools for IT initiatives has increased in recent years. This funding can increase risks in two ways. First, new vulnerabilities can enter systems through new technologies. Second, threat actors know that more funds can be demanded in the case of a ransomware attack.

Chromebook Cybersecurity: Pros and Cons

Chromebooks are popular in schools for good reason. Their design makes it difficult for them to be used for anything beyond their intended purpose. 3rd party software can’t easily be installed on ChromeOS and neither can malware. They are also easy to restore to their default configurations.

Because of ChromeOS’s limitations antimalware and endpoint detection and response (EDR) can’t be installed either.  At first glance, this might not seem like a big deal, since Chromebooks have such limited capabilities that they aren’t valuable targets for threat actors. However, threat actors can use ChromeOS devices for initial access, to move laterally or to escalate privileges on more valuable devices. Especially in cases where students are allowed to take their devices home and leave the school’s defensive perimeter, these devices could be the perfect initial compromise vector and then permitted to return to the network.

Essentially, Chromebooks’ advantages lie in their general safety and limited capabilities, their disadvantages lie in the lack of visibility. It is essential to deploy network monitoring that does not rely on software installed on individual devices. Network Analysis and Visibility (NAV) tools can monitor the traffic originating from those devices to the internet (north-south traffic) and traffic between ChromeOS devices and other information assets in the network (east-west traffic). When threat actors use this traffic for malicious purposes, an NAV tool can detect that behavior in real time. 

Timing of Attacks: When You Are Most Vulnerable

Threat actors will look to attack when you are most vulnerable. The back-to-school period is a prime time for cyberattacks because IT staff are preoccupied with many tasks. Attacks take time to evolve, so it’s crucial to close adversaries’ windows of opportunity quickly. Stay vigilant and proactive to mitigate potential threats.