Presenters:
Mike Potter
Hasan Ali
Room: Crater Lake North, EMU 146, Level 1
Presentation: Coordination and Cooperation: K12 Information Security
Time: 01:15p – 01:45p

The K12 education community’s data and digital resources face increased attention from attackers, rising sharply since 2020. This data includes personal identifiable information (PII) about school employees, district families, past students, and students under the age of 18. Identity and credit thieves search specifically for and steal student PII. Students whose information is stolen and used for credit fraud often don’t find out until applying for financial aid for college.

While the number and severity of attacks against all school digital systems and data have increased, school districts vary widely in terms of size and the resources available to them to fend off or recover from these attacks. In the region served by the Cascade Technology Alliance (CTA), we have districts with a few hundred students and staff members combined as well as districts with tens of thousands.

All schools face these growing threats in the online world but at different scales and with vastly different levels of resources. In 2022, the Cascade Technology Alliance started a program to share ESD information security resources with member school districts. We offered a multi-phase, multi-year IT security assessment process to interested districts, using industry standard vulnerability scanning tools and recommendations rooted in security framework best practices.

Coordinating our efforts and working together in cooperation, we want to raise awareness of information security challenges (and solutions!) with our member districts as well as within the ESDs themselves. As such, we felt our presentation about the early stages of our program would best fit in the General Cyber Resilience Awareness track at the Oregon Cyber Resilience Summit, as we work to build information security awareness and resilience in the K12 community across our region.