Is Your Data Safe With Edtech?

Upon resumption of offline schools, Kabir, a 13-year-old boy in the 8th standard of a well-reputed school in New Delhi, saw a different line of conversation among his classmates, one that he seldom heard before.

- Akshit Pushkarna

He would hear discussions of what edtech platform is the best, how it helped his classmates, and general critique of the same. While Kabir was aware of the developments in the sector, he had never himself given it much thought. But hearing his peers talking about how online learning gave them a push in their learning, he decided to give it a go himself. Upon registering with a top edtech company, he received a mail that asked him to download a certain software for the smooth operation of the app on his device. The naïve boy installed the app and learned the dangers of cyber attacks in a dangerous way, seeing all his personal information hacked and accessed by a hacker.

With the increased dependency on devices for work and learning, it is not a shocking discovery to learn that the risk of cyberthreats has only increased during the pandemic. However, in the case of India, there has been a great increase in the booming edtech industry.

A recent report compiled by Singapore-based digital risk management enterprise CloudSEK found out that India is the biggest target of cyber threats to educational institutions and online platforms. The report titled Cyber Threats Targeting the Global Education Sector said that this was a consequence of the adoption of remote learning during the COVID-19 pandemic, digitisation of education, and prevalence of online learning platforms in the country.

To discuss the validity of the report and the extent of the increase in cyber attacks in the past couple of years, Entrepreneur India reached out to several top edtech platforms and discovered that this was indeed a fact. However, the reasoning that the report gave out, which basically related the increase to the increase in scale, is not the only issue here.

THE CYBER ISSUE