Is AI Ready to Protect Schools From Cyberattacks?

The use of artificial intelligence to bolster cybersecurity defenses is not new.

For at least a decade, much of the must-have cybersecurity tools available have been powered by machine learning, predictive analytics, and pattern recognition—subsets of the broader bucket of artificial intelligence, said Amy McLaughlin, the cybersecurity project director for the Consortium for School Networking, or CoSN.

What is new to the field is generative and agentic AI, McLaughlin said. Generative AI can create new content, including text, images, and videos, by using existing data and patterns it’s trained on. Agentic AI can operate autonomously to achieve different objectives, with minimal human supervision.

Experts are unsure of what role these emerging AI technologies will play in strengthening school districts’ cybersecurity.

“For cybersecurity, a lot of what is done in that space isn’t really something that aligns to generative [AI],” McLaughlin said. “You’re busy responding and identifying, as opposed to creating something new.”

But McLaughlin said she’s seeing a few school districts experiment with how they’re using these tools in their cybersecurity defenses, especially as cybersecurity continues to be a persistent concern for K-12 district technology leaders.

Cyberattacks are becoming tougher to tackle as districts rely more heavily on the use of digital technology for instruction and operations, while funding and staffing of school district technology departments have not kept up. Cybercriminals are also getting more sophisticated due to advances in technology, especially artificial intelligence.

More than half (51%) of educators said they expect the severity of cyberattacks against their districts or schools to increase in the next year as a result of artificial intelligence, according to a nationally representative EdWeek Research Center survey of 499 teachers, principals, and district leaders conducted in December and January.