For the past two years, ransomware attacks have been on the rise in K–12, and districts are struggling to keep up. Ransomware can be debilitating to districts and can impact the availability of services to educate students. Ransomware encrypts targeted systems, rendering files and applications useless. Having encrypted a district’s data, cybercriminals demand a ransom to decrypt the files. In the past, that would have been the end of the attack. The school could choose to pay and retrieve the data or not.
Now, K–12 institutions have better backup and recovery mechanisms in place. It takes…