New York State Education Department has addressed the Illuminate data breach in a notice on the state’s site that advises school districts that they must make their best effort to contact all students, including former students for whom they have addresses. They are also advising districts to keep records of who they notified and who…
Category: Education Sector
Ransomware attacks are hitting universities hard, and they are feeling the pressure
Danny Palmer reports: Schools and universities are facing an unprecedented level of ransomware attacks as incidents continue to severely impact the education sector. The warning comes from Jisc, a not-for-profit organisation that provides network and IT services to higher education and research institutions. Jisc’s ‘Cyber Impact 2022’ report suggests there’s an increased threat of ransomware attacks against education. Read…
Illuminate Education breach that affected NYC schools spreads to other districts
Benjamin Freed reports: A school district in Coventry, Connecticut, notified families of its students this week that students’ data may have been swept up in a breach of one of its vendors earlier this year. The breach-notification letter, dated Tuesday, stated that data belonging to the roughly 1,700 students enrolled in Coventry Public Schools may have…
Lewis and Clark Community College sends out notifications concerning ransomware incident
As reported previously, Lewis and Clark Community College was hit with a ransomware attack in November, 2021. They announced it immediately due to impact on the functioning of their systems, but it appears that they are just now issuing breach notification letters to individuals. Their notification letter says that information was encrypted but that there…
Learning Opportunities from Ransomware and Redline Infostealer Events Inside America’s Universities
Britton White writes: After a university was recently hit with Ransomware, I decided to research the university’s domain name searching for any users who might have been hit with Redline Infostealer/Malware. To no surprise, I found many students had unknowingly had their saved browser credentials scraped (stolen/exfiltrated). It didn’t take long to find a student…
Growing Number of Contra Costa Community College District Email Accounts Compromised By Phishing Attack
Takeshi Kawata reports: Over the past month, Contra Costa Community College District (4CD) students and faculty have been inundated with phishing emails from compromised student and employee accounts, according to the district. The vast majority of phishing emails contain links to forms that request individuals’ personal information. The recent outbreak of scam emails is the…