Here at the Coro blog, we write a lot of cybersecurity stories about business executives and small companies. But today we want to talk about schools.

As if schools didn’t have enough to worry about, they are now targets for cyberattacks.  

Most of us first started thinking about cyberattacks on schools after the tragedy at Lincoln College. 

Lincoln College was over 100 years old. It survived a world war, Spanish flu, the Great Depression, another world war, and even Covid. But it only took one ransomware attack to shut the historic college down for good. Like too many organizations, Lincoln College wasn’t prepared for the devastating effects of a ransomware attack. 

Unfortunately, cyberattackers have continued to train their sights on schools. In November 2022, we started seeing a troubling trend. 

Starting Nov. 14, 2022, all public schools in two counties in Michigan were closed down because of a cyberattack. 

Around Thanksgiving, Cincinnati State College was taken offline after a ransomware leak. The school has since been able to resume classes, but email and many other online faculties are still inoperable.  

#ViceSociety #ransomware group claims responsibility for the #cyberattack against Cincinnati State College (@CinStateCollege), a public technical and community college in Ohio, 🇺🇸. pic.twitter.com/Y0FbHp8gqR

— BetterCyber (@_bettercyber_) November 24, 2022

And on Nov. 30, 2022, a school in New Jersey had to cancel classes for the third day in a row after experiencing technical issues from an unauthorized third party. As of the publication of this piece, the investigation is still ongoing. 

We saw the warning signs of attacks like these several months ago. In May of 2022, the FBI was already warning Colleges and Universities to be on guard: 
 

“…[T]he FBI said U.S. college and university credentials are being advertised widely across cybercrime forums. In May 2021, the FBI says it found more than 36,000 email and password combinations for email accounts ending in .edu publicly available on instant messaging platforms frequented by cybercriminals.” Full article

As this trend continues, we’re seeing one common thread: inadequate cybersecurity. This might be excusable 10 or 15 years ago. But now we should all be aware of the inconvenient ubiquity of cyberattacks. The good news is that there’s an easy solution to keep your school safe. Coro offers a ready-to-use cybersecurity kit that protects your five most vulnerable domains: emails, data, endpoints, cloud apps, and even your users. 

Our AI-driven platform requires very little human interaction, making it perfect for busy schools, colleges, and universities. It takes moments to install and lets you remediate cybersecurity threats with just a single click. 

References for this blog:

• Ransomware attack shutters 157-year-old Lincoln College
• Cyberattack forces public schools in Jackson, Hillsdale counties to remain closed Tuesday
• Cincinnati State College one of several schools added to ransomware leak sites on Thanksgiving
• Internet issues caused by ‘unauthorized third party’ close South Jersey school
• FBI warns US colleges of widespread VPN credential leaks on Russian cybercrime forums