{"id":188066,"date":"2026-02-17T00:05:00","date_gmt":"2026-02-17T05:05:00","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/testing.news-you-need.com\/index.php\/2026\/02\/17\/is-ai-ready-to-protect-schools-from-cyberattacks\/"},"modified":"2026-02-17T01:20:10","modified_gmt":"2026-02-17T06:20:10","slug":"is-ai-ready-to-protect-schools-from-cyberattacks","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/testing.news-you-need.com\/index.php\/2026\/02\/17\/is-ai-ready-to-protect-schools-from-cyberattacks\/","title":{"rendered":"Is AI Ready to Protect Schools From Cyberattacks?"},"content":{"rendered":"

Is AI Ready to Protect Schools From Cyberattacks?<\/a><\/p>\n

https:\/\/www.edweek.org\/technology\/is-ai-ready-to-protect-schools-from-cyberattacks\/2026\/02<\/a><\/p>\n

Publish Date: 2026-02-17 00:05:00<\/a><\/p>\n

Source Domain: www.edweek.org<\/a><\/p>\n

Author: <\/a><\/p>\n

Using an unordered list, summarize the following article with between 4 and 8 key points.
\n 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\u2014subsets 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\u2019s 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\u2019 cybersecurity.\u201cFor cybersecurity, a lot of what is done in that space isn\u2019t really something that aligns to generative [AI],\u201d McLaughlin said. \u201cYou\u2019re busy responding and identifying, as opposed to creating something new.\u201dBut McLaughlin said she\u2019s seeing a few school districts experiment with how they\u2019re 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.
\n How districts are using generative AI in cybersecurity<\/p>\n

The information technology team for the Oak Park elementary school district in Illinois has been playing around with using generative AI tools for cybersecurity, but the results have been mixed.William Brackett, the director of technology for the 5,500-student district, and his team have experimented with using the technology to ask for insights on data logs of helpdesk tickets, to figure out what\u2019s missing from the district\u2019s cybersecurity incident response plan, and to troubleshoot programming code.Generative AI models are not perfect, though, Brackett said. In his experimentation, the tools have sometimes produced \u201cred herrings\u201d and unusable insights. The technology is also not good at doing an analysis of huge internet traffic data logs, because \u201cit can get sidetracked pretty quickly,\u201d he said. He achieved better results by isolating the data and asking the AI to focus on specific subsets.Many of the cybersecurity tools the district has been using now also have generative AI features built in, Brackett said. Those are often more reliable than general generative AI models such as ChatGPT, Gemini, or Copilot because \u201cthey\u2019re already trained on the data that\u2019s coming in since the vendor already knows how their data formats in [it],\u201d he said.<\/p>\n

Brackett and his team are testing these added AI features and evaluating whether using them is more efficient than not.The experimentation is \u201cbuilding our expertise internally,\u201d Brackett said. \u201cSo when AI becomes a major feature of any new products to come, now we know what to ask, what to look for, how to examine, how to question, how to watch the demo.\u201dFor Gary Lackey, the director of cybersecurity for the 24,000-student Goose Creek school district in Texas, the fact that AI has become a buzzword for ed-tech companies has made it difficult for him and his team to determine how to use the technology in their district\u2019s cyber defense.\u201cA lot of companies are, overnight, switching their discussions from, \u2018Hey, we use algorithms and machine learning,\u2019 to all of a sudden, when AI became a buzzword, they\u2019re like, \u2018Oh, well, we use AI,\u2019\u201d Lackey said. \u201cThat\u2019s a struggle for a lot of school districts\u2014which [products] are actually using [AI] and which ones are just using it as a buzzword?\u201dLackey and his team haven\u2019t used generative AI for any internal cybersecurity actions. But Lackey said he has heard of some possible use cases that other district tech leaders have tried, such as allowing a generative AI tool to scan an environment to see if there\u2019s anything exposed that shouldn\u2019t be or asking it to generate tabletop exercises to help an IT team prep for a cyberattack scenario.But Lackey and his team already \u201chave some other tools that aren\u2019t necessarily AI that are doing some of that,\u201d he said.It feels more time-consuming for a district IT team to use generative AI for certain cybersecurity tasks when there are already proven products that do the same thing, Lackey said.
\n What it would take for district IT teams to embrace AI<\/p>\n

It\u2019s unlikely that many district IT teams have the bandwidth and the expertise to create their own cyber defenses using generative AI, said McLaughlin, CoSN\u2019s cybersecurity project director.\u201cIt doesn\u2019t mean it couldn\u2019t be done,\u201d she said. \u201cI don\u2019t know if it would be production ready. I think that\u2019s the difference. You can do things in the classroom or in a lab environment. The question becomes, when do you put them into production, and are you going to rely on them for your defense?\u201d<\/p>\n

Many district IT teams\u2014which are generally short-staffed and lack deep cybersecurity expertise\u2014hope that generative AI and other emerging AI technologies will be able to help them defend their systems more quickly and effectively, said Doug Levin, the co-founder and national director of the K12 Security Information Exchange, or K12 SIX, a nonprofit focused on helping K-12 schools prevent cyberattacks.\u201cLargely, [AI\u2019s] promise still remains in the future,\u201d Levin said.Relying on generative and other AI technologies would be expensive solutions at a time when the federal government under the Trump administration has reversed course on K-12 cybersecurity funding, many state and local governments are facing budget shortfalls, and many school districts don\u2019t have the resources for basic cybersecurity defenses, Levin said.With the federal government shifting its role in education, \u201cit really is beholden on states to take the lead,\u201d Levin said.For district IT teams to fully embrace these tools in their cyber defense, they need support in ensuring AI-powered cybersecurity products are made with K-12 schools in mind; they need help vetting these tools; they need support in figuring out best practices for using AI in cyber defenses; and they need the whole district community to be AI literate, experts and district tech leaders said.In the meantime, cybersecurity experts said, generative AI hasn\u2019t changed the best practices for defending a school\u2019s network, which include training students and staff, conducting risk assessments, and practicing incident response plans.Still, district tech leaders see these emerging tools playing a part in cybersecurity moving forward.\u201cThe genie is out of the bottle,\u201d said Brackett. \u201cWe\u2019re going to have to utilize some of those tools.\u201d<\/p>\n

<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Is AI Ready to Protect Schools From Cyberattacks? https:\/\/www.edweek.org\/technology\/is-ai-ready-to-protect-schools-from-cyberattacks\/2026\/02 Publish Date: 2026-02-17 00:05:00 Source Domain:…<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":188067,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"fifu_image_url":"https:\/\/epe.brightspotcdn.com\/dims4\/default\/5d282de\/2147483647\/strip\/true\/crop\/7167x4792+0+0\/resize\/942x630!\/quality\/90\/?url=https%3A%2F%2Fepe-brightspot.s3.us-east-1.amazonaws.com%2F88%2F2a%2F8035196d40b395bb7f89dc057569%2F021126-ed-tec-sr-cyberattacks-langreo-fs-2183734978.jpg","fifu_image_alt":"","footnotes":""},"categories":[15],"tags":[26,20,24],"class_list":["post-188066","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-cybersecurity","tag-ai","tag-artificial-intelligence","tag-cybersecurity"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/testing.news-you-need.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/188066"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/testing.news-you-need.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/testing.news-you-need.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/testing.news-you-need.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/testing.news-you-need.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=188066"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/testing.news-you-need.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/188066\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":188068,"href":"https:\/\/testing.news-you-need.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/188066\/revisions\/188068"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/testing.news-you-need.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/188067"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/testing.news-you-need.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=188066"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/testing.news-you-need.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=188066"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/testing.news-you-need.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=188066"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}