A San Diego County Office of Education executive has taken part in the White House’s “Back to School Safely: Cybersecurity Summit for K-12 Schools.”
Chief Information Officer Terry Loftus joined U.S. Secretary of Education Miguel Cardona, Secretary of Homeland Security Alejandro Mayorkas, First Lady Jill Biden and school administrators, educators and representatives of private sector companies on Tuesday to discuss best practices and resources available to protect students and schools and prevent cyberattacks from disrupting classrooms.
“We know that our nation’s K-12 system makes high-quality education accessible to all and is an institution that is key to the future prosperity of United States,” Loftus said during the event, which was webcast (his panel begins at the 01:25:00 mark). “Unfortunately, our K-12 sector is deeply under-resourced and outmatched when it comes to evolving and increasing cybersecurity threats.”
He called on schools to join in a “better together” strategy, which he described as “critical moving forward.”
Such a strategy, he said, would include K-12 school districts, charter schools, county offices, and state-level agencies, along with federal partners.
Loftus is regarded as an expert in K-12 cybersecurity. In 2021, he received the California State Information Security Leader of the Year Award, which recognizes an individual who has developed future IT leaders while creating strategies to promote information sharing and collaboration.
Under Loftus’s leadership, the county Office of Education became the first such office in the state to fully implement multi-factor authentication, which acts as an additional layer of security to prevent unauthorized users from accessing accounts, even when passwords have been compromised.
The office also created the Red Herring phishing awareness, training and testing platform that enables schools, districts and county offices of education to simulate phishing attacks and train staff members to better identify suspicious emails and other security threats.
The U.S. has experienced an increase in cyberattacks targeting schools in recent years. The attacks have disrupted school operations, and also impacted students, families, teachers and administrators when personal data has been stolen.
“Just as we expect everyone in a school system to plan and prepare for physical risks, we must now also ensure everyone helps plan and prepare for digital risks in our schools and classrooms,” Cardona said. “The Department of Education has listened to the field about the importance of K-12 cybersecurity, and today we are coming together to recognize this and indicate our next steps.”
Planned federal actions include establishing a Government Coordinating Council that will coordinate activities, policy and communications between federal, state, local, tribal and territorial education leaders to strengthen the cyber defenses of K-12 schools.
U.S. education officials and the Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency also jointly released “K-12 Digital Infrastructure Brief: Defensible & Resilient,” the second in a series of documents to assist educational leaders in building and sustaining core digital infrastructure for learning.
