BUELLER? BUELLER? — School’s out for the summer, that is unless you plan on protecting your classroom from state-backed ransomware attacks. To better shield the country’s increasingly virtual education system from incoming cyberattacks, the White House is convening its top squad at a cyber summit for K-12 schools this afternoon. — CISA training sessions: America’s premier cyber agency is posturing to deliver tailored assessments, facilitate exercises and offer cybersecurity training to 300 new K-12 “entities” (CISA wouldn’t identify more specifically) over the incoming school year. Expect those exercises to come about once a month, 12 times a year (does that mean homework in the summer?) and are meant to help schools identify their own cyber risks. — Hold up: Administration officials are not promising new federal regulations to address the problem, instead casting today's events at the White House as a first step to action. — Enter the industry groups: It’s hard enough to spread limited resources within school budgets, let alone ward off cybercriminals tripping up infrastructure systems with ransomware attacks. Some IT and software giants including Amazon Web Services, Cloudflare and Google are joining the Biden administration to emphasize the need for post-attack monitoring through grant funding and free services. Among the offerings is a $20 million cyber grant commitment from AWS available to school districts and state departments of education as well as no-cost cyber incident response assistance, with Cloudflare offering public school districts with under 2,500 students a suite of free Zero Trust cybersecurity solutions. Those measures could go a long way, considering schools that do invest in cyber mainly focus on preventative controls before an attack. “Schools don’t invest in monitoring and response, so they’re unable to control the impact of an event,” said Michael Hamilton, former CISO for the city of Seattle and founder of PISCES, which helps train students to become cyber analysts. “They're just not in a situation where they can monitor their networks.” — Disinfo strikes back: The White House’s long-awaited cyber workforce and education strategy released last week called for “foundational cyber skills” to be taught to the general population — and is again repeated as a K-12 cyber protection tactic. This could very well be a side door for realizing the Department of Homeland Security’s shuttered Disinformation Governance Board, which opened and closed in less than four months last year. And to Hamilton, it translates into an increasingly prioritized goal to make Americans less gullible in recognizing disinformation and fraud attempts. “Our media literacy in this country sucks ass,” Hamilton told MC. “Rather than having the federal government being the arbiter of what’s disinformation, they want to equip the population with their own ability to suss this stuff out.” — A history of attacks: Despite becoming an increasingly visible target for ransomware groups, school systems still receive woefully low funding to protect against attacks. The latest State EdTech Trends report found 70 percent of school officials reported at least one district in their state was the victim of a cyberattack, while 57 percent said their state provided very little funding for cybersecurity. Our colleagues on POLITICO’s Weekly Education team have more details on how the Education Department is involved in today’s announcements.
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