It’s Cybersecurity Awareness Month, and ManagedMethods is joining organizations everywhere to promote the #BeCyberSmart campaign.
Cybersecurity is especially critical in schools. The use of cloud-based applications is becoming more widespread every day, and cloud cybersecurity continues to be overlooked by district leaders. While cybercrime has evolved, K-12 cybersecurity strategies have not.
According to recent surveys, over 90% of school districts use cloud applications like Google Workspace and Microsoft 365, but many fail to secure those applications adequately.
For school IT leaders, cloud security is a new issue, and there isn’t a lot of awareness around how it’s different from network security and why it’s crucial. Further, persistent cloud security myths deter district IT leaders from learning about the new processes and tools they need to keep data stored in their cloud apps secure.
Traditional security tools are effective in fighting legacy threats that attack your perimeter. But they don’t adequately secure cloud access to address contemporary threats against cloud applications. Once a hacker gains access to your cloud data, which happens more often than we’d like to believe, they’re out of reach of traditional network security tools.
User behavior analysis focuses on monitoring user behavior for anomalous activity. It is part of an overall zero-trust cybersecurity strategy that many school districts are moving toward.
Anomalous behavior could be trying to log into the account from an abnormal location, such as another country. The anomalous activity could also be a user suddenly sharing many files outside of your domain or sending lateral phishing emails.
Here’s an example of how a cybercriminal could gain access to your sensitive data through existing accounts. Assume that a hacker gains access to a relatively low-profile teacher account. Now they’re “in the network” and can bypass many of your traditional security measures that are perimeter-based. They can use this low-profile account to gain access to higher-level accounts with access to more sensitive information. An increasingly popular way to do this is to launch a lateral phishing attack, which comes from inside your domain and isn’t flagged by most phishing filters because your own domain is trusted.
User behavior analysis in cybersecurity is also helpful for identifying insider data security incidents, whether they be accidental or malicious. One of the best ways to determine how vulnerable your data is to attack is to conduct a cloud behavior security audit.
A cloud behavior security audit will identify user behaviors that indicate a cyberattack is happening or imminent. The audit will also spot unapproved or inappropriate behavior by your users. Sometimes this behavior is accidental, but it can also be malicious. These are the seven most common cloud security threats we’ve seen highlighted when we’re running audits with school districts:
We’re offering a free 30-day cloud security audit for K-12 school districts to celebrate Cybersecurity Awareness Month!:
Signing up for a free audit is an excellent first step in gaining visibility and control over what is happening in your district’s cloud apps.
From the many conversations we’re having with district IT teams, we’re finding that the main reason why K-12 leaders are overlooking the issue of cloud application security is that they’re just not aware of all the risks in the cloud. And they think that their vendor providers are protecting their data for them.
If you’re like most district IT leaders, you might think that Google, Microsoft, and/or your various other edtech vendors are protecting your data for you. You might also believe that your next-generation firewalls and content filter are enough to protect you.
Unfortunately, this is not the case. And this misperception is part of what is fueling the dramatic increases in K-12 cyber incidents over recent years.
A cloud content and behavior security audit will be a real eye-opening experience for you. Take it from Vaughn De Fouw, Infrastructure Engineer at Kettle Moraine School District:
“Knowing what’s going on with our data and our logins is required for security and privacy. ManagedMethods pulls everything together into an easy-to-use dashboard. I don’t have to spend a lot of time trying to use the built-in Google and Microsoft admin tools and trying to manage the complexities.”
When you sign up for a 30-day free cloud content and behavior security audit, here’s what you can expect:
Now is the time to audit the content and behavior in your district’s cloud apps and make sure you’re going into the holiday season with as much visibility, control, and protection as possible. Sign up for our free audit to and #BeCyberSmart.