Betsy Hammond reports: Two separate audits found the Oregon Department of Education didn’t do enough to ensure that its huge cache of data on more than 600,000 students remains private. Hundreds of people in school districts and in state government have access to some or all of that data. That means keeping it safe is…
Search Results for: education
MarsJoke Ransomware Targets the Government and K-12 Educational Sector
Catalin Cimpanu reports: Crooks are targeting government and educational institutions with a new ransomware family named MarsJoke (or JokeFromMars), discovered in late August, but which came to life this week through a massive email spam wave. The group behind this ransomware is using emails disguised as air travel confirmation notifications, which also contain a link…
Children’s Educational Site Exposes Thousands of User Accounts and Payment Data
Another child-oriented site has exposed information due to a misconfigured MongoDB installation. This time, it’s ABCya.com, according to the MacKeeper security research team. Here’s what they reported they found exposed: credentials and information of 11k+ archived customers (including IP addresses, email addresses, names, temporary access codes, hashed and salted passwords) credentials and information on 21k+ active…
Initial Release of the Information Security Primer for Evaluating Educational Software
So pleased to see this announcement from Bill Fitzgerald: One of the unspoken issues in working on security and privacy in educational software is that, while many people are passionate about privacy and security, many people don’t know how to start evaluating software or how to assess any potential risks they might uncover. One of…
Security education outfit EC-Council dishes out ransomware online
First it was a hospital serving up ransomware to web site visitors. Now the website of the EC-Council, who are responsible for the Ethical Hacker certification, is reportedly serving up the Angler exploit kit to infect PCs. And as we heard with the Norfolk General Hospital, it seems to be difficult to notify them and get a response from the…
Stolen contractor laptop had special-education student data for Montgomery County students
Donna St. George reports: A contractor working with the Montgomery County school system has informed the parents of about 340 special-education students that the children’s private data was on a computer stolen during a break-in. WestEd, a nonprofit research organization, acquired the student data from Montgomery County school officials as it conducted a review of…