Sensitive student data exposed after ransomware attacks

Numerous U.S. students had their sensitive data, including sexual assault, parental abuse, and psychiatric hospitalization details, exposed following ransomware attacks against schools across the country, according to The Associated Press. While Minneapolis Public Schools had complete sexual assault case folios leaked by ransomware attackers as part of a more than 300,000 file dump in March, none of the individuals whose data were compromised have been informed by school administrators. "A massive amount of information is being posted online, and nobody is looking to see just how bad it all is. Or, if somebody is looking, they're not making the results public," said Emsisoft Analyst Brett Callow. More than 5 million students across the U.S. have already been impacted by ransomware attacks but funding for cybersecurity systems has lagged, noted Recorded Future Analyst Allan Liska. Full-time network security staff has only been observed in 16% of U.S. school districts, only almost half of which had 2% of their IT spending allocated toward security efforts, a Consortium for School Networking survey revealed.