The company Blackbaud is one of the world's largest providers of education administration software. Earlier this year two very bad things happened to them:
- They got hacked, exposing the personal and financial data of their students, former students, staff, and supporters.
- They knew about the hack but failed to inform those who might be impacted until months after it happened. Under General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR), companies must report a significant breach to data authorities within 72 hours of learning of an incident - or face potential fines.
The Honor Roll Difference: Customized and Secure School Websites – Free for the First Year
Blackbaud is one of the major players in the educational software industry. While the company has tried to downplay this ransomware attack, as well as how they paid the ransom to regain access to their servers, clients are understandably angry and concerned.
"They told my university that there is 'no reason to believe that the stolen data was or will be misused'. I can't feel reassured by this at all,” one school official said. “How can they possibly know what the attackers will do with that information?"
Honor Roll School Websites: Protecting Your Data
Our Honor Roll websites offer a wealth of benefits to schools and school districts of all sizes and types. You can get the details on why they have been so successful here. But let’s focus on security: What made Blackbaud vulnerable?
Imagine you’re a hacker – you can target one school, and if successful access their data. Or, you can target Blackbaud, the company that provides platforms to hundreds of schools – if successful, you’ve hit the mother lode.
While Honor Roll also uses a Software-as-a-Service (SaaS) platform, we keep every school segregated in our systems from every other client. An attempt to breach one would never impact any other school or district. And to take every precaution against a successful breach, we have an experienced CISO (Chief Information Security Officer) that oversees the protection of our client data.
With Honor Roll you’ll receive the convenience and cost-savings advantages of our website platform, as well as state-of-the-art data protection.
A Great New Website: Free for the First Year
To help school districts cope with the additional challenges brought on by the pandemic, Honor Roll is pleased to offer a one-year free program that allows your schools to revise or scale up their websites without increasing costs, so they have one less thing to worry about.
We’ll provide everything you need to get your site up and running, including:
- Design of your custom site
- All content migration from your existing site
- Launch of your mobile app
- Secure, redundant hosting of your site
- Unlimited, free training and support for your staff, volunteers and parent administrators
- Upfront, low pricing after the first year, with flexible per school pricing
- There is no contract – you may cancel after the year is up and owe nothing
