Another strategy to safeguard your school is to perform an audit.  

During the upheaval of remote learning caused by COVID-19, it’s possible that the IT safeguards your school had in place were overlooked. Teachers and administrators, trying to ensure that learning continued under extremely trying circumstances, may have downloaded new software and apps outside of IT processes, vendor assessments, and security vulnerability scans. 

Performing a risk assessment can help you address this and is a good step to protect your school’s network against cybercrime. Mike Baur, who works within the education technology vertical at Amazon Web Services (AWS) advised schools ask themselves these questions when conducting an audit: 

• What does your system look like?
• What is your infrastructure?
• What companies are you working with from an edtech perspective and how well are they operating with each other?

Another way districts can protect themselves is through cybersecurity insurance. But if you are considering insurance, it might be a good idea to move fast: insurance companies are raising expectations for what conditions they’ll accept. This can even be true for districts that already have cybersecurity insurance and are looking to renew.  

Finally, having a cybersecurity plan is crucial. This includes: 

• Ensuring your leadership team has a mitigation plan  
• Knowing how to engage with local authorities immediately in the event of a suspected breach 
• Planning how and what to communicate to parents and other stakeholders if there’s a cyberattack  

A good framework to build your school’s cybersecurity plan can be found by taking the plans and processes your district already has in place for emergencies and using them as a model for a chain of command and communication protocols during a cybersecurity incident.