While you worry about TikTok, hackers are targeting your child’s school
Parents spend hours fretting about their kids’ screen time.
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Is YouTube rotting their brains? Is Snapchat messing with their confidence? Is that stranger on Roblox really a child?
These are real worries, of course, but they’re not the complete picture of online safety.
As parents, it’s natural to look at what’s in front of us, or in our direct control, but there are dangers beyond iPads and phones at home. It’s about what schools are doing, or not doing, with their computer systems.
Think about it, your child’s school has their full name, date of birth, home address, medical information, even behavioural and safeguarding notes. All neatly stored away in digital files. To a criminal hacker, that’s worth far more than a TikTok password or getting some Robux from their Roblox account.
It’s not just a hypothetical, either. Schools are being hit. In the last five years, 73% of UK schools have been hit by cyber attacks. These range from minor breaches to complete system outages caused by ransomware, with hackers threatening to dump children’s records online unless a ransom is paid. In almost all instances, parents are left in the dark, and if the school didn’t have the right layers of protection, children’s most sensitive information was suddenly at risk.
Yet when we talk about “keeping children safe online”, this side of the story barely gets a mention. We fixate on the front-end. Who they’re messaging, what they’re watching, while ignoring the back-end systems across so many places quietly store their most private details.
We need to widen the lens if we’re serious about children’s safety and futures in the digital age. Protecting them online isn’t just about blocking dodgy websites or keeping them off their phones at night. It’s about ensuring that the places we trust with our data, schools most of all, adopt a culture of cybersecurity readiness, keeping learning uninterrupted and information safe from cybercriminals.
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Paul Alberry is the CEO and Co-Founder of Secure Schools.
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