FBI warns of cyberattacks to distance learning – By Luke Barr (ABC News) / January 4 2021
Students return to the virtual classroom this week.
As students head back to the classroom after the holidays, the FBI is warning students, teachers and parents that cyber criminals and bad actors are looking to exploit online classrooms.
FBI Cyber Section Chief Dave Ring told ABC News the agency has seen an uptick in ransomware attacks.
“It’s of greater concern now when it comes to K-12 education, because so many more people are plugged into the technology with schooling because of the distance learning situation,” he said. “So things like distributed denial of service attacks, even ransomware and of course, domain spoofing, because parents are interacting so much more with the schools online.”
In early December, the FBI and the Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency issued a warning that showed a nearly 30% increase in ransomware attacks against schools.
