Educational institutions hold valuable and sensitive data, such as personal, financial and medical data on prospective students, enrolled students and alumni, employment information about their faculty and staff, and research data.

The University of Alabama says a 2009 computer security incident involving a server for Brewer-Porch Children’s Center may have exposed some personal information for about 1,400 former clients, employees, and medical providers.

The Monroe City School district’s computer system shut down last week. According to Superintendent Dr. Brent Vidrine, the system is back up and running, but others are still confused about what happened to the system in general.

The kind of attacks more commonly reserved for banks and other institutions holding sensitive data are increasingly targeting school systems around the country. The widespread adoption of education technology, which generates data that officials say can make schools more of a target for hackers, also worsens an attack’s effects when instructional tools are rendered useless by internet outages.

More than 900 current and former employees of the University of Nebraska-Lincoln’s Institute of Agriculture and Natural Resources have been offered identity theft protection after a laptop containing their personal information was stolen overseas.

This week, the Northwest Indian College (NWIC) has been facing a cyberattack identified as the Ryuk ransomware virus. The outbreak has corrupted many internal files on our systems, including backups and legacy data.

The Lyon County School District has joined the growing list of local agencies hit by hackers after a virus took down its systems earlier this month. The cyberattack also took down services that were tied to the network, including the school district’s phone lines.

A recent audit has revealed that the Maryland Department of Education “inappropriately” stored personal information of more than 1.4 million students and more than 230,000 teachers.