U.S. Schools and Colleges Witness a Huge Rise in Number of Leaked Records

What do the findings reveal? 

• A report from Comparitech revealed that U.S. schools have lost over 24 million records in 1,327 data breaches in the past 15 years. 
• The report further unveiled that hacking is the primary cause of most data breaches.
• Data breaches from K-12 schools accounted for the leak of over 1 million records.
• Verizon in its latest report revealed that in the first fourth months of 2020, the education sector witnessed phishing attacks in 28% of breaches and hacking via stolen credentials in 23% of breaches.

Factors for data leak

The most affected 

• Public institutions are affected more by breaches as compared to private ones.
• California is the most affected state due to the data breaches that occurred in both colleges and K-12 schools. So far, the state has witnessed 157 of 1,328 breaches.

Reckoning the biggest breaches from the past

• In October 2006, the University of California was hit by a cyberattack allowing a hacker to gain access to a database containing information of 800,000 students, faculty, and staff.
• In 2010, Ohio State University data breach impacted 750,000 records. The incident occurred due to unauthorized access to the university’s server. 
• In 2012, hackers gained access to a database belonging to the University of Nebraska and stole 654,000 records of current students and alumni.
• In 2013, the data breach at Maricopa County Community College District resulted in a loss of 2.49 million records. 
• In 2018, the San Diego Unified School District revealed a phishing attack that resulted in the compromise of 500,000 records.
• In April 2019, Georgia Tech announced that nearly 1.3 million current and former faculty members, students, staff, and student applicants were affected due to unauthorized access to a web application.
• In the same month, Washington State University notified a data breach that occurred due to the loss of a hard drive that contained sensitive information of 1.1 million individuals.
• In Nevada, three K-12-related breaches affected 673, 487 records, while in Florida, 17 school breaches affected 504,135 records.

What else needs to be worried about?

• The FBI reported that the ransomware attacks on K-12 schools that leverage Remote Desktop Protocol vulnerabilities have increased notably since September 2019.
• Such attacks have hit 17 school districts compromising 284 schools between January 1 and April 8. 

Bottom line