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In Albuquerque, Elder says the cybersecnrity contingency plan triggied the school shutdown as well as a process to review movement of students" data, But because the district had no vendor contracts specifically for cyberattacfc response, the district made an emergency school board request for more than $250,000, to be paid to the cyber forensics company conducting the audit. the superintendent says. K-12 cyberattacks are so common the Consortium for School Networking released a tool (tern· \coan.org/toola -and-resou rcfa/resource/k-12 evat) for districts to assess the strength of vendors· information, data and cyberseenrity policies before agreeing to a service contract The FBI and local police department advised the Albuquerque district to generalize descriptions of the cyherattack and lo judiciously omit in public communications the more granular details of the law enforcement investigation, Elder says. The school district already was using role-based security at the time, but since then has implemented virtual private network access for critical applications, intrusion-detfction applications to monitor anomalous traffic and multifar-tor authentication, among other measures. Cloud Data Transfers Though it's never good when a cyberartack bits a school district, the summer 2019 timing of cyberterrorists' intnision into the financial system of Coventry Public Schools, located southwest of Providence, R.I., blunted the potential educational Impact on the district s a,ooo students.