Class was canceled Monday across the Freehold Township school district, but not for the familiar January troubles of slushy roads, frozen pipes or a busted boiler.
No, this was “a cybersecurity event” that ground school business to a halt.
District officials disclosed little about what happened, assuring parents in an email they “retained outside IT expert consultants who are working around the clock” to fix the problem.”
Marc Pfeiffer, a senior fellow at the Bloustein Local Government Research Center at Rutgers University, said local governments are increasingly seeking out cyber insurance policies, which often require specific steps be taken to protect networks from intrusion.
“Any organization that has data as their lifeblood and is on the internet needs to take basic security precautions,” Pfeiffer said.
“There are many things organizations can do to protect themselves, including a robust training regimen of their employees to make sure they can identify spam and malware and not click on things,” he added. “But many technical solutions and actions can be expensive to buy and maintain. No one agency can do everything.”