Security Breach, Threat Trends and It's Impact to Education

Data breaches and hacking needs to be on the forefront of a school threat assessment.  And as leaders in technology, we need to make sure our leadership counterparts know that these invisible risks are real and continue to be on the rise.  

BLG's Cybersecurity, Privacy & Data protection team periodically provides webinars on online risks and best practices.  Their recent webinar on cyber incident management and response looked at current trends, including what an organization can do to prevent an incident and, in the event it does happen, how to be prepared.  The reality is the cost of a security incident is not only reputationally costly, but staggeringly high. 

With the fluidity of information in schools, the outcome of so many users accessing information loose files with sensitive data is becoming as great risk as ransomware.  We also need to be aware and know what our third party's are liable for - what can they cover and what it means to our organization's reputation if something happens.

The seminar ended stressing that every organization needs to have data governance in place and within that have a planned a response.  These seem to be necessary steps to me, not an after thought.  Hackers that see best practices in place are more likely to target other similar organizations that do not do this.  As one presenter said, "When cased by a bear, you just need to be faster than others." 

So the thought I leave with is if cyber security and data governance is not high at your organization, what does it mean if it is high at another organization?