Cybersecurity Awareness and Resources

Dear District Administrators,

As the new school year arrives, it’s a great opportunity to remind everyone how important cybersecurity is. A wrong click can lead to a data breach, virus, ransomware, or other cyber incident that can impact school operations and/or expose private information.

Education in the form of cybersecurity awareness training is the best first line of defense. While technical controls and using cybersecurity best practices such as CISA (Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency) can certainly assist keeping people safe, cybersecurity awareness training is relevant to everyone, and teaching cyber hygiene will help society long term. Cyber hygiene is repeatedly doing cybersecurity tasks so that it becomes a natural habit. Engraining phishing identification and avoidance, strong and unique passwords, multifactor identification, and safe internet browsing techniques, will help keep people, and the networks they’re operating on, safer.

But what happens if something still goes wrong?

The reality is that it’s not a matter of if, but rather when the cyber threat actors manage to do something malicious to your IT systems and data. When faced with suspicious activity, districts should refer to their Incident Response Plans, which may include things like calling the Wisconsin Cyber Response Team and/or contacting their cyber insurance should further assistance be required. Reviewing your Incident Response Plan and running through these exercises prior to an incident happening will help make sure everyone knows their role in an incident; from reporting suspicious activity, to communicating information about the incident, engaging help, all the way to performing a review after the incident is resolved.

For questions or more information, please feel free to reach out to Tim Greve (tim.greve@dpi.wi.gov), DPI Chief Information Security Officer

Resources

DPI Cyber Security Resources Site

Governor’s Cybersecurity Summit and Women in Cyber Event (Free for students with registration code HSSR23)

Information, Agenda, and Registration (October 23-25)

Wisconsin Cyber Response Team (CRT)

-24-Hour Duty Officer: 800-943-0003 option 2 (tell them you have a cyber incident)

Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency (CISA)

-Protecting Our Future: Partnering to Safeguard K-12 Organizations from Cybersecurity Threats (Essential recommendations and toolkit designed for K-12)

-CISA Cyber Essentials Starter Kit (Cyber Essentials guide and NIST best practices for leaders)

-CISA Cybersecurity Best Practices

Multi-State Information Sharing and Analysis Center (MS-ISAC)

-MS-ISAC Services (Many free tools/security baselines/resources as well as some paid services)

Enjoy this back-to-school season with your students, staff, families, and communities.

Sincerely,