Young Hackers Taking Their Choice
Education Cybersecurity Weekly is a curated weekly news overview for those who are concerned about the Education industry and Education data breach. It provides brief summaries and links to articles and news across a spectrum of EdTech. Learn about young hackers issue.
This week Louisiana Governor John Bel Edwards declared a state of emergency due to several security breaches, which hit City of Monroe School District, Morehouse and Sabine. In case of the first-time incident, police representatives explain teenager what happened and push the suspect into 10 to 20 hours ethical computer training.Hacker’s formula: one vendor, two states and thousands of student records at risk
The personal data of thousands of students across Hawaii and Tennessee might have been compromised via a third-party vendor.
Last week Graduation Alliance, an accredited online high school and data and web hosting service, discovered an unauthorized access to its database, storing names, ages, ethnicities, emails, and academic information of nearly 70,000 students in Hawaii.
As Graduation Alliance database did not include Social Security numbers, financial data or health records, Hawaii state law does not qualify the incident as a security breach.
However, law enforcement officials and cybersecurity companies are investigating the incident and Hawaii’s Department of Education is to send letters to the parents of affected students.
Decisive measure to get rid of danger: Louisiana cybercrime led to state of emergency
In the previous digest we mentioned that ransomware is a real-life disaster for educational organizations and not every K-12 or Higher Ed institution is able to dodge that bullet. However, it seems to be even more serious than we could imagine.
This week Louisiana Governor John Bel Edwards declared a state of emergency due to several security breaches, which hit City of Monroe School District, Morehouse and Sabine. Phone systems were also destroyed.
The declaration is designed to join efforts of public organizations in the fight against cybercrime, so that specialists from the state Office of Technology Services, the Louisiana State Police, and the Louisiana National Guard are involved in the investigation. In addition to removing the malware from infected systems, the aim of the expert group is to “assist local governments in responding to and preventing future data loss.”
While cybersecurity attacks on colleges and schools are constantly increasing, it is important to have a strong proactive strategy in place to eliminate the potential data leakage.
Education is better than punishment: European authorities give young hackers a second chance
“Not every young hacker is an evil genius” European authorities thought and started a legal intervention campaign for offenders accused of committing cybercrime for the first time. The remarkable detail – the effort, known as “Hack_Right”, is targeted at people of the age between 12 and 23 years old.
More than 400 young hackers have been already involved in the experiment. The average age of accused cybercriminal – 19 years old, most common motivation is to try the new tricks or impress the mates via stealing the password. In case of the first-time incident, police representatives explain teenager what happened and push the suspect into 10 to 20 hours ethical computer training.
We do this to get out and find them and get them into computing clubs before we have to investigate someone and lock them up. Cybercrime is not a law enforcement problem. It’s a societal problem.
Gregory Francis, acting national prevent lead at the National Cyber Crime Unit of the National Crime Agency