Get the latest tech news
Meet the Hired Guns Who Make Sure School Cyberattacks Stay Hidden
An investigation into more than 300 cyberattacks against US K–12 schools over the past five years shows how schools can withhold crucial details from students and parents whose data was stolen.
The extent to which this involves keeping critical information out of the public’s hands is made clear in the advice that Jo Anne Roque, vice president of risk services account management at Poms & Associates Insurance Brokers, gave to leaders of New Mexico’s Gallup-McKinley County Schools after a 2023 cyberattack. President Biden’s deputy national security adviser, Anne Neuberger, writing in an October op-ed in the Financial Times, said insurers are right to demand that their clients install better cybersecurity measures, like multifactor authentication, but those who agree to pay off hackers have incentivized “payment of ransoms that fuel cyber crime ecosystems.” But at the same time that school officials were refusing to acknowledge publicly that they had been hit by a ransomware attack, their attorneys were telling federal law enforcement that the district almost immediately determined its network had been encrypted, promptly identified Medusa as the culprit, and within a day had its “third-party forensic investigation firm” communicating with the gang “regarding the ransom.”
Or read this on Wired