Cyber liability is one of the hottest topics out there for charter schools. The potential risks and consequences for losing student and parent information are tremendous, so your charter school must carry the insurance coverage necessary to protect itself.

In addition to that, we recommend taking measures to protect yourself and your school from potential cyber liability claims. The following tips and tricks will help preserve your charter school from potential claims:

• Protect Secure Student Information. The most significant risk exposure is losing student and parent personal information. This can happen if an administrator fails a laptop or a hacker can obtain sensitive personal data from the charter school’s computer network, including laptops, mobile devices, and tablets. As a result, a parent or group of parents may be able to bring claims against the insured for allowing access to their information.

• Secure Passwords. Another common way for hackers to penetrate a school’s network is through the breach of passwords. Employees with relatively common passwords leave their computers and accounts open to attack. A best practice is to require employees to use more complicated passwords and change passwords regularly.

• Extortion Events. Cyber extortion involves an attack or threat of aggression against an organization and a demand for money to prevent or stop the attack. While extortion is not new, the emergence of cyber extortionists has recently begun to rise. Today, unknown malware and hackers are tapping into systems for financial gain and to create disruption. But, whether intentionally or not, a data breach occurs if they gain access to personal information.

• “Hacktivism.” Another one of the biggest eye-openers is so-called “hacktivism.” Hacktivism is breaking into a computer system for a politically or socially motivated purpose. There have been dozens of cases where commercial websites have been altered or disabled, sensitive information has been stolen, and even government systems have been breached. This trend is interesting because the perpetrators are not doing it for monetary gain but to raise awareness of an issue.

If you would like to learn more about cyber liability’s importance for your charter schools, please don’t hesitate to contact our office.