Cybersecurity in Education: Safeguarding Students, Staff, and Infrastructure

Students, staff, and infrastructure all rely heavily on the health of a school’s cybersecurity program. When it comes to preparing for cyber incidents, it may seem like a distant possibility. The truth is any organization with a computer or online device carries some inherent cyber risk.

The impact of a cyber incident can damage trust, relationships, operations, and ultimately, cost thousands of dollars in recovery efforts.

The Threat Landscape

Threat actors want things to be easy. When they experience push-back in their attempts to breach organizations, they quickly move to an easier method of attack. In the education sector, timing and personnel play a large role in the likelihood of a breach occurring. Threat actors can manipulate individuals, including staff, and emulate or impersonate legitimate employees or officials.

The human element plays a large part in cyber-attacks in the education sector. Over an 18-month span from 2024 to 2025 with over 5,000 K-12 institutions surveyed, the human element is targeted for attack 45% more often than other more technical vulnerabilities.

Employees and staff in this sector can grow to be very trusting mainly because they’ll rarely need to communicate with outside sources. Most email and phone communications that happen daily within school systems are internal. When a threat actor can impersonate a colleague or staff member, it’s more likely to be effective in the education sector due to the nature of communications.

While the sector is heavily targeted and high- impacts like halted operations and lost revenue are significant, a closer look reveals the profound effects a cyberattack can have on a school.

When operations are impacted, record-keeping and grading access may be limited, internal systems such as lunch payment processing systems can be disrupted, and schools may not be able to operate at full scale. This causes issues for the students in a day-to-day scenario, concerns for parents, and creates urgency to find temporary solutions to address these issues, and ultimately, reflects poorly on the school’s integrity.

On December 28, 2024, the Edtech platform, PowerSchool, became aware of a breach that exposed highly sensitive information including student social security numbers, grades, and medical information. Threat actors accessed PowerSchool’s internal customer support portal using stolen credentials. 

The PowerSchool system supported over 16,000 customers and more than 50 million students. This incident highlights the importance of proper cybersecurity protection.

Student and Staff Safety: Exposure of Social Security numbers, grades, and medical information puts students at risk of identity theft and fraud.

Widespread Impact: With over 50 million students affected, the breach impacts a vast number of individuals in the educational community, including teachers, parents, and guardians.

Trust in Technology: Schools and districts must be wary of their third-party connections to software and how their data is managed by those vendors.

Legal and Compliance Issues: Schools must adhere to data protection regulations, and breaches can lead to legal consequences and fines.

Resource Allocation: Schools may need to divert resources to address the breach impact, such as implementing new security measures and supporting affected individuals.

Legal implications are another reason schools should be working diligently to protect their systems. Schools are required by law in most states to report their breaches to the Department of Education. In addition, the records held by schools containing information for minors, are of increased concern for parents, again emphasizing the importance of proper protections.

Finally, Due to the nature of operation, schools issue and manage devices for both in school and out of school usage. Monitoring these devices is crucial because of their possible connection to unsecured WI-FI networks and general safety of students using the devices. Remote monitoring solutions are incredibly important to ensure regular patching and appropriate usage of these devices.

Steps to cyber maturity

An important step toward cyber maturity begins with the staff. By implementing proper security awareness training strategies, you can enable your people to become your biggest and best line of defense against intrusive threats.

Disaster response planning can also be an effective strategy in preparing for a cyber incident. Incident response planning can prepare your team to be ready and begin remediation processes immediately as soon as an incident occurs. Like preparation with a fire drill, practicing your cyber incident response plan allows you and your team to respond calmly and appropriately when something comes up. 

How cybersecurity programs are funded in education is also a consideration. Some systems do not have a dedicated budget or have only a limited budget allocated to cybersecurity. Additionally, identifying where to spend that limited budget may be difficult with the complexities that can come along with budgets and cybersecurity. SpearTip helps organizations understand their budget, where to spend, and the impacts it will make, daily.

As we continue to trend toward the inevitable adoption of more technology, AI, and learning devices, understanding the risks in the cybersecurity realm is as important as ever. Organizations with immature programs and limited defenses against cyber threats may become targets for threat actors. Our team helps organizations identify vulnerabilities, monitor around the clock to thwart cyber attacks, remove stress from the technological adoption, and ultimately, allow organizations to operate as normal. Through our 24/7 Security Operations Center actively monitors devices, accounts, and behaviors to mitigate cyber threats. 

Our Advisory Services team specializes in assessing and identifying risk while unveiling a roadmap to a more secure future, helping you understand your current posture and the best next steps to take to strengthen your cybersecurity defenses. 

In case of emergency, our incident response team is ready to respond at every hour of the day. 

See how SpearTip can help your school strengthen its cybersecurity posture!