Yo team — you have to see the Dark Reading piece because the third-party breach threat in education is absolutely terrifying and we need to talk about it! Koru Education, a Kiwi school network, was hit by ransomware that encrypted their entire system, forcing them to pay $1 million plus an additional 30% of their annual budget just to get back online — which is insane for a regional provider. Another attack breached the HVAC vendor's software and exposed over 62k student records at an Illinois high school. These are not abstract risks; this is real ransom money flowing out of schools and private data being dumped on the web because one trusted partner was insecure.

The fundamental problem is that these organizations have strong perimeters but trust third parties implicitly without checking their defenses, which creates a "one weak link" vulnerability where an attacker just needs to compromise the least-secure vendor in the chain. The fix isn't more firewalls; it's contract requirements and proof of security for anyone touching student data: every vendor must prove MFA is enforced everywhere plus run EDR with active SOC monitoring — no exceptions. Many school districts have tiny IT teams who can't vet 50 different vendors alone, so the legal team needs to bake these clauses into every new agreement from day one.

Source: https://www.darkreading.com/cyber-risk/third-party-breaches-teaches-education-lesson-vendor-risk