| | DECEMBER 20258EUROPEEUROPETECHNOLOGY SOLUTIONS THAT DRIVE EDUCATION SECTORIN MY OPINION By Coby Culbertson, Chief Technology Officer, Dubuque Community School DistrictHELPFUL REMINDERS ADDRESSING CYBERSECURITY IN PK-12 EDUCATIONThrough this article, Coby Culbertson, Chief Technology Officer at Dubuque Community School District, stresses the critical importance of cybersecurity in PK-12 education. He recommends practices like least privileged access, multifactor authentication, and regular phishing awareness training to combat threats and enhance school districts' security. Among all the competing priorities and concerns that technology leaders face in PK-12 education today, cybersecurity always remains at the top of their minds. School districts across the country and the globe continue to be the target of cyber criminals and malicious threat actors seeking to cause severe damage and disruption to the instructional delivery and operations of the organization. When school districts are the target of these nefarious attacks, the children, families, and communities are most impacted. Therefore, as a reminder, school districts can implement many practices and security measures to help prevent malicious activity by threat actors. The following (certainly not an exhaustive list) are some of those practices and security measures to help position a district against these adverse events:· Adopt a least privileged philosophy where computer and system access rights are restricted for users to only what is needed for their job or learning. · Implement an extended detection and response (XDR) solution that collects, correlates, and analyzes signals, threats, and alert data across their environment, including endpoints, emails, applications, and identities.· Adopt a Secure First, Remediate Later (SFRL) stance regarding staff and student user accounts. This means that if any unknown or abnormal activity is detected by a staff or student user account, the account is automatically disabled, preventing system access until an investigation of this activity has been performed.Coby Culbertson
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