One reason school cyberattacks are on the rise? Schools are easy targets for hackers
Scott Elder has a pretty typical morning routine. He wakes up at 7 a.m., drinks coffee and feeds the dogs, Bella (a rat terrier) and Spencer (a Chihuahua). But on Jan. 12, 2022, Elder's routine was interrupted by a concerning phone call.
Elder is the superintendent of Albuquerque Public Schools in New Mexico, and the call came from his district's IT department, saying they had found some sort of computer virus.
He recalls thinking, "Oh, we've got a bug in the system and they found it so they'll just kill it and we'll be done, right?"
The bug was in the student records system. So Elder's IT staff shut that network down. But that meant teachers wouldn't have access to basic information about the almost 70,000 students enrolled in New Mexico's largest school district. Educators couldn't take attendance, wouldn't know children's bus routes and were locked out of grading systems.
Meanwhile, IT staff was desperately trying to figure out whether the computer virus had spread to their health records, security system and payroll.
Over the course of the morning, Elder began to understand the enormity of the situation.
"I would say that I went from mildly disturbed at 7 a.m., to very concerned by 9 a.m., to sick to my stomach by noon because I was beginning
