A brief discussion with Andrea Tejedor, Educational Strategist at Bluum
Five million, eight hundred and forty-three thousand, four hundred and eighty (5, 843,480). That's the number of devices in the education industry that have reported enterprise malware encounters in the last 30 days, according to Microsoft Security Intelligence. This makes education the largest affected industry in front of retail, healthcare and high-tech. Undoubtedly, hackers are constantly sharpening their skills and the common cyber threats they cause are evolving.
With schools adopting new EdTech tools and creating more innovative learning environments, digitally responsive educational organizations are encouraged to be more vigilant in strengthening their cybersecurity defenses to deal with new and emerging attacks. Digitally responsive educational organizations (schools, districts, colleges and nonprofits) are those that have leveraged their digital resources to respond to the pedagogical, technological and organizational needs of the learning community.
While cybersecurity continues to be an essential component of this digital response, appropriate cybersecurity policies, procedures, and practices are needed to help ensure teachers, staff, and students have the access and resources they need while maintaining the privacy and security of data and networks.
To provide some expert insights on this, we spoke with Dr. Andrea Tejedor, MeEd, educational strategist at Bluum. Andrea shared how educational organizations can address cybersecurity and what they need to do to protect themselves from attacks.
Question: How can teachers, parents and students address cybersecurity?
Andrea: Cybersecurity is not just an IT problem.; Shared ownership and accountability need to be established within the learning community. To accomplish this, a collaborative process that involves representatives from all areas of operation in the district is required to design, implement and improve key contingency management practices. This process includes:.
Question: What should educational organizations do to protect themselves from attacks?
Andrea: Digitally responsive educational organizations can take various actions to prevent, protect from, mitigate the effects of, respond to and recover from cyberattacks. To prepare for attacks, educational organizations can do several things.
Question: How is Bluum protecting digitally responsive educational organizations from attacks?
Andrea: Educational organizations should select a partner with capabilities to pinpoint vulnerabilities, define actions to close security gaps and build resiliency to prevent the loss of instructional time and money. Bluum protects digitally responsive educational organizations from attacks by:
Digitally responsive educational organizations should avoid these trends in K-12 cybersecurity threats by engaging in the processes outlined above and defining the cyber governance structures in their district. They can also identify ways to train staff on cyber hygiene and their role in protecting data and digital assets.
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