During Tuesday's school board meeting Ron Brown, the executive director of technology, innovation, safety and security, said the work is timely and crucial.
"We have things in place to protect us from any currently known ransom or ransomware, or anything like that," Brown said Tuesday.
A September alert from the Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency (CISA) warned of increased cyber attacks against K-12 schools with the potential impacts including "restricted access to networks and data, delayed exams, canceled school days, and unauthorized access to and theft of personal information."
In January, a hacker took control of the websites of 4,500 school districts nationwide, while other attacks have resulted in the release of sensitive information in both Los Angeles and Minneapolis. In Edmonds, schools were delayed and Internet access was restricted after the district "observed suspicious activities" on the network in January, which disrupted school operations for weeks.
The Wenatchee School District has not been the victim of a similar attack, and according to Brown, the district is taking steps to prevent one in the future.
"We have done a lot of improvements behind the scenes around our cybersecurity, our response to cybersecurity, our response to attacks that could come," Brown said. "And there's some things coming that are going to affect people. We're adding some more stringent ways of logging into things and authenticating with systems."
Brown said he's working with both the Department of Homeland Security and CISA to asses the district's systems.
Some of the systems, like multi-factor authentication, will be rolled out by the fall of this year for staff. The work will also require additional training, like properly setting and storing passwords.
Students may be required to have two-factor authentication in a year.
"It's really thinking about 'what are those critical pieces of data we wouldn't want shared, wouldn't want accessed, and don't want to have held ransom or get hacked,'" Brown said. "And that's who we're going to hit first with forcing that."
Other systems have already been implemented, with the district tight-lipped on the exact security protocols.
"We're in a pretty good place, and we have some things behind the scenes that I don't really want to say that we have," Brown said. "So we've protected ourselves fairly well and hardened our systems."
In recent years, the district upgraded the physical safety of schools, which includes adding more than 100 additional doors to the access control system and adding video doorbells at nearly every site.
"What we have tried to put in place, and we're really, really close, is about a 20 year lifespan of new hardware," Brown said. "We were woefully outdated before the pandemic, and we upgraded a lot of stuff."
This year, the district replaced the "alarm phone line communicators" with cellular devices for additional features, cost savings and better service. The district has, or will, replace the fire alarms at Orchard, Mission View and Pioneer elementary schools, systems that Brown's presentation called, "failing."
According to Brown, increasing access control will be considered on a case by case basis, with a focus on entry points that are most effective for "access and safety."
"We always get the question 'why can't we put it on every door?'" Brown said. "An example, the high school alone has 171 doors, exterior facing. It's hard to believe they have that many doors, but that's a lot hardware at almost $2,000 a pop."
Funding for upgrades has come from federal COVID money and federal money for emergency connectivity, among other sources.
©2023 The Wenatchee World (Wenatchee, Wash.). Distributed by Tribune Content Agency, LLC.
