The recent surge in homeschooling and remote learning has been challenging for parents, educators, students, and school IT administrators. Even before remote learning became the norm, schools were major targets for cyber attacks. According to the K-12 Cybersecurity Resource Center, since 2016, there have been at least 775 publicly disclosed cyber incidents against educational institutions in the U.S. alone. Further, the number of incidents more than doubled between 2018 and 2019, increasing from 122 to 348.
Now that more students and teachers are using both their own and school-issued devices from remote locations, school IT administrators are being swamped with technical issues, which is diverting IT resources away from cybersecurity. Cybercriminals are taking full advantage of the chaos, prompting the U.S. Federal Bureau of Investigation to issue a formal warning regarding the cyber threats posed by insufficiently secured remote education platforms.
Here are 4 ways Keeper’s password management and cybersecurity solutions help school IT administrators keep teachers and staff members, students, and parents secure.
1. Establish and Enforce Good Password Hygiene
Since Verizon estimates that about 80% of successful data breaches can be traced back to stolen or compromised passwords, ensuring that all staff members, parents, and students are practicing good password hygiene is crucial to securing online education platforms. Keeper’s business password management solutions give school IT administrators complete visibility into employee, student, and parent usage of school-related login credentials, enabling them to monitor password use across the entire network and enforce policies such as strong passwords, 2FA and other security protocols.
2. Enforce Role-based Access
Role-Based Access Control (RBAC) and least-privilege are critical in all organizations, and arguably even more so in a remote education environment, where staff members, students, and parents all require different levels of access to different systems. With Keeper’s business solutions, school administrators can easily set up shared folders for teams, such as individual school locations, grades, classrooms, or academic departments, then use fine-grained access controls to customize staff member, student, and parent permissions.
3. Prevent Password Overload and Eliminate Password Resets
Password overload is a serious issue. According to a survey by Digital Guardian, 70% of consumers have over 10 password-protected online accounts, and 30% have “too many to count.” In remote education environments, password overload problems are compounded in households that include multiple school-age children, on multiple grade levels and possibly attending multiple schools, all using their own systems. With Keeper, each user gets a private, encrypted digital vault that they can access anywhere, from any device. Parents with more than one child can store all of their children’s passwords in the same digital vault. No one will ever lose or forget another password — which means that help desk tickets to reset lost or forgotten passwords will be a thing of the past.
4. Prevent Phishing Attacks
Keeper’s auto-fill feature automatically fills user login credentials, which not only saves users time and hassle but also helps secure them against phishing. Cybercriminals are using the remote learning boom to take advantage of tech-challenged parents (and educators) and attempting to get them to enter their login credentials on phony lookalike sites with domain names that are just a tad different; for example, ABCE1ementary-dot-com instead of ABCElementary-dot-com. Keeper prevents this by only auto-filling credentials onto sites that have been stored within the Keeper Vault.
Secure Your School Today
Keeper takes only minutes to deploy, requires no special equipment or installation costs, and scales to the size of any educational institution, whether a small, private school, an entire district, or a large university. Reach out to Keeper today and discover how simple and affordable it is to protect your institution and its staff members, parents, and students against password-related cyber attacks.