Nevada’s Clark County School District revealed a data breach last month, leading the school board to seek state funding for internet connectivity, as the Las Vegas Review-Journal reports. A cyber attack forced an Oklahoma district to delay the first day of school, according to FOX 25. And a Southern California school district was also crippled by a cyber attack, as The Sun in San Bernardino, Calif., reports.

A North Carolina district was even forced to close for an entire week due to a cyber attack perpetrated by, as the superintendent told ABC 13 News, “dirty, rotten, lowdown scoundrels.” Elsewhere in the Tar Heel state, a charter school has sued a former employee for allegedly obtaining sensitive data about students, staff and parents, as the Wilmington, N.C., Port City Daily reports.

In Spokane, Wash., school officials said they were implementing cybersecurity measures as virtual learning begins, according to local KXLY. Students can’t download material onto school-provided laptops, which the IT department can track and, if necessary, lock-down remotely.

Mathew Newfield, chief information security officer at Unisys, recommends parents talk to their children about cyber risks. For example, he told Nashville’s WKRN, students should know how to verify the safety of links they receive in emails or text messages.

Other cybersecurity experts recommend content filters for children’s devices, though that generally comes pre-installed on computers provided by schools, according to WTVY in Alabama. “It's kind of like the COVID thing,” a local cybersecurity professor told ABC 15 News. “You just have to work together, have a healthy discussion… what protocols are we going to follow, just to stay healthy.”

As GovTech notes, institutions of higher learning such as the University of Utah and the University of California-San Francisco have paid six- and seven-figure sums to get their systems back online after cyber attacks in recent months.