Number of Schoolchildren Losing Personal Data on the Rise

School files found on the dark web contain loads of personal details that should not be there in the first place. What is more, the number of affected children most likely continues to grow as we speak and has probably gone well beyond the one million mark now. Was this leak part of a well-scripted scenario or the aggregate outcome of several recent ransomware attacks whose creators failed to collect a single dime of ransom?

Security researchers tend to place more emphasis on the second option. Considering the vast number of business and government institutions that fell victim to obnoxious cybercrooks demanding exorbitant ransom amounts, it's no wonder why people across all segments of society, including underage students, take a hit in the end.

Troublesome Statistics

Emsisoft analyst Brett Gallow has spotted more than a thousand American schools that have gone through the ordeal of ransomware attacks in 2021 alone. The scope of the leaked data varies from one individual to another. While leaked banking credentials are luckily few and far between, other personal details such as social security numbers and medical records have been on the loose long enough to trigger a wave of identity thefts in the extreme.

Is It Due to Subpar Web Protection?

That educational institutions lack high-level network security is a long-standing, well-known issue. Some schools, researchers say, never even knew they had been attacked, let alone detect when exactly they got the infection. Others, who got the hint on time, did not know how to proceed in the aftermath. Still, others claim that the government has given them no road map to follow when in need. Granted, the FBI's general advice not to pay any ransom whatsoever is no longer news among anyone. What the educational system needs right now is to know what to do if/when the crooks decide to put the data online anyway? For it is almost sure they will do so regardless of the victims' decision. A regular backup could restore the stolen files, yet it could not prevent them from being leaked, and thousands of students at the Weslaco Independent School District learned that the hard way last December.

Since school data leaks have been on a roll for at least 15 years now, the chances are that every student may already have experienced, or will experience, personal data leaks at one time or another. To mitigate the effects, however, parents could only go as far as taking steps to freeze their children's credit cards to prevent the crooks from using them to take out loans at someone else’s expense.