Protecting Children's Data Needs to Be a Priority for All

This commentary describes an escalating cybersecurity threat landscape for K–12 schools — citing a reported >300% increase in breaches and a doubling of districts impacted by ransomware — and highlights how stolen children’s personally identifiable information enables synthetic identity fraud. It calls for stronger school cybersecurity practices (multifactor authentication, role-based access control, patching, backups, monitoring), government support and minimum standards, enterprise changes to reduce demand for children’s data, and increased parental awareness and responses.