IBM offers $5M in grants to help schools with cybersecurity

IBM is allocating $5 million of in-kind grants to help schools cybersecurity threats.

For the second year in a row, the Armonk-based company will award grants to six U.S. school districts, including the Poughkeepsie City School District, and the program is being expanded overseas with four additional grants for school districts in Brazil, Costa Rica, Ireland and the United Arab Emirates.

Through this grant program, IBM volunteers will help schools establish programs to address cybersecurity resiliency and will provide services including developing incident response plans and ransomware playbooks. The programs will address the need for updating operating systems, providing cybersecurity training for staff, students, and parents, and implementing strategic communication plans to use in response to a cyber incident.

“For schools, a large barrier to strengthening their cybersecurity posture often comes down to constrained budgets, which financially motivated threat actors bet on,” said Charles Henderson, global managing partner and head of IBM Security X-Force. “By pursuing targets with lower defenses, threat actors can reap quick rewards and yield a higher return. In the event of ransomware attacks, the extreme added pressure schools experience to pay a ransom to recover their operations is a profitable wager for the bad guys. As a leader in the security community, it’s our duty to help our educational institutions strengthen their cyber preparedness.”