As technology continues to grow and evolve, new challenges are coming to light for any industry that handles private information. The threat of cyber attacks on school districts is on the rise throughout the country with schools becoming a favorite target for ransomware and identity theft attacks. Through funding from the 2019 Technology levy, Central Public Schools is focused on making security improvements to keep both the district and student private information safe and secure.
School districts face the challenge of actively monitoring the activity on all devices such as servers, desktop and laptop computers, and others used in district operations and teaching and learning. Watching and analyzing the activity for anything suspicious needs to be a priority as cyberattacks often happen outside of normal business hours. The key to stopping an attack is to quickly identify harmful activity and to take steps to shut it down quickly.
“Once a hacker gains access into a system they can rapidly go through the entire network,” said Central Public Schools Technology Director Steven Anderson. “In order to be able to protect against these threats, it is essential to have a high level of cyber security expertise and enough staff to continually monitor the network activity.”
Central Public Schools is proactively taking steps to secure the network, including working with the State of Minnesota IT Services to add a new product from CrowdStrike. This system provides next-gen antivirus protection and complete endpoint detection and response. It also provides 24/7 monitoring and analysis of the activity on our systems and their team of experts will immediately step in to stop any suspicious activity that is detected.
“While we can’t ever say that anything like this is 100% effective, we know that with these threats becoming more common, that we need to take steps to prevent it from happening here,” said Superintendent Tim Schochenmaier. “Having a technology levy in place gives us dedicated funding to secure our system and provide a modern education to our students as they prepare for a variety of different career paths.”
CrowdStrike will also work with the district to ensure complete remediation after any attempt to infiltrate the network and are currently ranked globally as the most used managed detection and response service. By partnering with CrowdStrike, the district is able to provide a level of security expertise and cyberattack protection that goes above and beyond the standard protocols.