A new information sharing and analysis center (ISAC) set up to help American school districts protect themselves against cyber-threats has named its first national director.

Heading up the Kindergarten Through Twelfth Grade Security Information Exchange, or K12 SIX, is president of consulting firm EdTech Strategies and the K–12 Cybersecurity Resource Center, Douglas Levin.

Levin is the founder of the K–12 Cybersecurity Resource Center and creator of the K–12 Cyber Incident Map, a visualization of cybersecurity-related incidents reported about US K–12 public schools and districts from 2016 to the present.

“I’ve been tracking the growth in attacks in this sector since 2016,” said Levin. “We’ve seen a marked increase over time, and a real spike since COVID-19. I’m glad to be joining an action-oriented organization that is working to proactively protect schools.”

K12 SIX was softly launched in October 2020 by the Global Resilience Foundation (GRF), a nonprofit subsidiary of the National Council of ISACs. It’s the first intelligence-sharing hub to be specifically created to meet the needs of local school districts in preventing and mitigating cyber-attacks.

Staff at K12 SIX are tasked with reviewing security incidents reported to them by schools. Their role is also to enrich and share actionable alerts based on intelligence provided by private security vendors, other sharing communities, and government sources.

The role of regional director at K12 SIX has been filled by Eric Lankford, former cyber-engineer with the Birdville Independent School District near Fort Worth, Texas.

Together, Levin and Lankford came up with the idea to create an ISAC for schools and approached the GRF with their proposal two years ago.

With no federal requirement for school districts to report data breaches, Levin believes that the Government Accountability Office (GAO) is not aware of the true extent of the problem. 

The GAO counted 99 school data breaches from July 2016 to May 2020 that compromised the personal information of thousands of students in kindergarten through high school. Levin counted 458 data breaches in school districts that impacted more than a million student records. 

While the GAO counted each cyber-attack as one incident regardless of how many school districts were affected, Levin counted each district’s data breach separately.

The Justice Institute of British Columbia (JIBC) has launched a new online Graduate Certificate in Cybercrime Analysis to help meet Canada’s growing demand for professionals with cybersecurity skills.

This new post-graduate program has been established to furnish professionals with the advanced knowledge and applied analytical skills necessary to help prevent, detect, and respond to the constantly evolving landscape of cybercrime. 

“Cybercrime is an ever-increasing threat that requires constant vigilance,” said Dr. Michel Tarko, JIBC president and CEO. 

“We’re pleased to offer a new graduate-level certificate program specifically addressing cybersecurity and cybercrime that bridges the gap in available offerings across Canada.”

The JIBC will offer the new graduate certificate part-time to all Canadians, whether they are new graduates interested in pursuing a career as a cybersecurity analyst or established professionals seeking to expand their skillset and advance their careers.

Teaching will take place virtually, with the first cohort of the program slated to begin in September 2021. The program consists of five courses that are delivered one per semester sequentially and takes approximately 18 months to complete.

Students of the program will develop a broad understanding of cybercrime analysis and be provided with foundational intelligence-analysis skills. After completing the course, students will be able to conduct intelligence investigations that can be used and applied in various court proceedings.

Courses will be taught by leading industry specialists who have accrued extensive experience in their particular fields. The curriculum has been designed to meet the needs of various public security and law enforcement agencies and is highly relevant to multiple industry sectors, including banking, accounting, and finance.

“JIBC’s Justice & Public Safety Division is very proud of its intelligence analysis and tactical criminal analysis programs,” said Dr. Stuart Ruttan, dean of the School of Criminal Justice & Security and Office of International Affairs. 

“The new graduate certificate in cybercrime analysis will provide our graduates with access to education, training and internationally-recognized credentials to assist them in being a part of the solution in the battle against cybercrime in our economy, and society in general.”

Chinese multinational technology company Alibaba Group Holding Ltd is offering Uyghur/ethnic minority recognition as a cloud service, according to a new report by surveillance industry researcher IPVM and The New York Times.

Users simply send photographs of people taken on their phones or pulled from surveillance videos to Alibaba’s facial recognition service, then receive an alert if the subject is identified as a minority Uyghur from the western province of Xinjiang.

The Cloud Shield system offered by Alibaba Cloud “detects and recognizes text, pictures, videos, and voices containing pornography, politics, violent terrorism, advertisements, and spam, and provides verification, marking, custom configuration and other capabilities.”

A record of the technology, perma.cc/9ZUV-UD2F, details how it can perform “glasses inspection” and “smile detection,” and determine whether the subject is “ethnic” and, specifically, “Is it Uighur.” 

Since its discovery by IVPM, the record has been archived. 

“Alibaba Cloud quickly deleted mentions of Uyghurs and minority detection on its website after Alibaba was contacted for comment,” stated an IVPM spokesperson. 

“Alibaba Cloud then claimed, without evidence or explanation, that these features were only used “within a testing environment.”

Alibaba released a statement declaring that it was “dismayed” that Alibaba Cloud had developed facial recognition software that allows individuals in video imagery to be tagged by ethnicity. 

The company claimed that the feature in the software was “trial technology” that was not intended for the use of customers.

An Alibaba spokeswoman told Reuters: “We have eliminated any ethnic tag in our product offering.”

IVPM researchers said that they had identified over a dozen Chinese police departments that are using analytics to track Uyghurs. 

“Alibaba’s offering of this explicitly racist technology to its vast Cloud clientele shows the repression of Uyghurs goes well beyond law enforcement,” stated IVPM.

Earlier this month, IPVM together with The Washington Post revealed that PRC-based tech companies Huawei and Megvii had tested and validated “Uyghur alarms” in face recognition software that were designed to be used in video surveillance projects by Chinese police.

News of Alibaba Cloud’s ethnic-minority-flagging facial recognition technology follows IPVM’s discovery a year ago that China’s largest video surveillance manufacturer Hikvision promoted a Uyghur-detecting AI camera.