On this episode, Josh, Chris and Mark unpack “Black October,” a wave of AI-driven cyberattacks that exposed vulnerabilities across industries and hit the K12 world hard. The conversation covers the recent PHP zero‑day exploitation, a spike in AI‑powered intrusions and agent‑based hacks, and why the speed of modern attacks forces districts to rethink patching, monitoring, and cloud vs. on‑prem strategy.
The guys summarize major breach stories affecting schools and vendors, including the Frontline Education incident, and describe the troubling delays in breach notification.
The episode concludes with a technical interview with Jonathan Kobe of Fortinet. Jonathan outlines concrete recommendations for K12 IT teams: restrict and MFA‑protect management access, adopt segmentation, consider automatic patching for critical infrastructure, enable deep packet/SSL inspection where feasible, and leverage managed SOC/SIEM services to make log data actionable.
Articles Discussed:
https://www.latimes.com/california/story/2026-10-16/state-testing-student-data-hack
https://cybernews.com/news/hackers-breach-school-tech-giant-serving-50-million-students-nationwide/
https://www.nbcnews.com/specials/hooked-youtube-videos-schools-junk-infiltrating-classrooms-google/
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Music by Colt Ball
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