Analysis of 1.3M Emails Unveils Hidden Threats Missed by Other Email Security Solutions
Analysis of 1.3M Emails Unveils Hidden Threats Missed by Other Email Security Solutions

Email Compliance With Family Educational Rights And Privacy Act (FERPA)

The Family Educational Rights and Privacy Act (FERPA) is a federal law enacted by the U.S. Department of Education in 1974 that protects the privacy rights of student education records. Requirements of FERPA apply to any public or private elementary, secondary, or post-secondary school and any state or local education agency that receives funds under an applicable program of the US Department of Education.

The act serves two primary purposes:

  • Grant rights to parents or eligible students more control over their educational records.
  • Prohibits educational institutions from disclosure without consent “personally identifiable information in education records” without the written parental permission of an eligible or dependent student, or if the student is a minor, the student’s parents (20 U.S.C.S. § 1232g(b)). An eligible student has reached age 18 or attends a school beyond the high school level.

Who Must Comply With FERPA?


Any organization that stores student information, social security numbers, contact information, and financial data must follow FERPA regulations. Colleges, universities, high schools, elementary schools, and vocational schools fall under FERPA compliance. Internal and publicly accessible systems must have the proper access controls and cybersecurity technology to reduce the impact of a data breach.

Non-compliance with FERPA can lead to severe penalties and cost the organization it’s funding, devastating its operations.

Other repercussions for non-compliance:

  • Lose any federal funding from the government.
  • Prosecution under specific laws, both state and federal.
  • Investigate employee misconduct and business practices to identify responsible parties and negligence.
  • Removal of any employee responsible for the data breach.
  • Temporary suspension of management overseeing compliance.

 

 What Are The Rights Of Parents And Students Under FERPA?

Parents or eligible students may take the following actions:

  • Inspect and review the student’s educational record maintained by the school. Schools are not required to provide copies of records unless parents or eligible students can’t check the original documents.
  • Request the school correct the records they believe to be inaccurate or misleading. If the school decides not to amend the record, the parent or eligible student then has the right to a formal hearing. After the hearing, if the school still decides not to amend the record, the parent or eligible student may place a statement with the record setting forth their view about the contested information.
  • Halt the release and access to education records containing personally identifiable information.
  • Access to a copy of the academic institution’s policy concerning access to educational records.

Schools, including all education institutions, must have written permission from the parent or eligible student to release any information from a student’s education record. Private postsecondary schools, however, receive funding and are subject to FERPA.

What Recourse Do Parents And Students Have In Case Of Breach Of Records


Medical or Health Disclosure Under FERPA

Legal experts have debated whether it might release student medical records to the school administration under certain triggering events, such as when a student is applying for a college or university.

Usually, student medical treatment records will remain under FERPA, not the Health Insurance Portability and Accountability Act (HIPAA). This element is not a violation because of the “FERPA Exception” written within HIPAA.

Examples of FERPA violations:

Emailing protected student information to everyone in the class.
Including social security numbers on shared documents.
Posting grades and identifying information in public.
Publicly disclosing a student athlete’s academic status.
Image link

In a 2002 Supreme Court case, Gonzaga University v. Doe, the court found that FERPA did not grant any personal rights to enforce the provisions. Even if a FERPA violation may have been committed, there is no legal recourse for a student or parent to sue a school for FERPA violations.

Education Institutes Obligation To Parents And Students During A Breach Discovery Event


The school must notify the parent or eligible student of the unauthorized release or breach of confidentiality of student data without unreasonable delay. This violation notification applies to cases of an unauthorized release of teacher or principal personally identifiable information data. They must notify each affected teacher or principal.

Emailing grades is permissible under FERPA. The Department of Education has ruled that it will hold an institution responsible for a violation of any unauthorized individual who views the student’s grades via your electronic transmission. 

**The Department of Education is the sole decision-maker for punishing a school for FERPA infractions. 

What Is The Role Of Cybersecurity In FERPA?

 

Family Educational Rights and Privacy Act of 1974 (FERPA) does not require educational institutions to adopt specific security controls. They are necessary to protect the data with industry best practices and available functional capabilities.

Compliance obligations and confidentiality of student data are at the core of FERPA regulations. Schools, colleges, and training companies protect access to student information and data from report cards to financial data and personally identifiable information (PII) at rest, in storage, and transit. Because of the sensitive nature of this data and, most times, the vulnerability of those whom it concerns, it can be a target for cybercriminals looking to extort the organization.

Educational organizations must follow best practices to protect student data from cyber-criminals. A student data breach could be costly from fines and legal fees.

Here are a few elements of FERPA compliance:

  • Educational institutions must encrypt all data at rest and in transit as a safeguard.
  • Test and remediate vulnerabilities in all systems storing student information.
  • Review security controls and policies regularly.
  • Monitor all systems for suspicious activity showing a data breach from outside sources or insider threats.

Role Of Data Loss Prevention In FERPA Compliance

 

Data Loss Prevention solves three significant objectives that apply to most organizations.

  • First, is the organization collecting students’ identifiable information?
  • Second, does the organization have the process and capability to remove the student’s data upon request?
  • Third, does the organization have a secure access policy to enable multi-factor authentication based on user actions?

The following events are some of the leading causes of data leaks in 2022.

  1. Misconfigured Software Settings.
  2. Social Engineering
  3. Recycled Passwords
  4. Poor Encryption
  5. Software Vulnerabilities
  6. Use of Default Passwords.

User experiences around email encryption vary depending on the solution and the service provider. Many email encryption and Data Loss Prevention (DLP) solutions are challenging to set up, costly, and challenging to maintain. Many security breaches occur in the enterprise due to misconfigured security solutions.

Gartner often references in their security reports the challenges of misconfigured security solutions impact expected outcomes of SecOps protection strategies.

DLP solutions like Trustifi can classify student information in unstructured and structured forms. Data visibility helps organizations gain more insight into how individuals within an organization interact with data. DLP can remediate various security challenges, including insider threats, office 365 data security, and user behavior.

  • Data breaches cause damage to the brand, regulatory violations, and loss of trust between the institution and parents.
  • Data Loss Prevention solutions require involving education leaders and IT.
  • Data Loss Prevention solutions must be implemented correctly and well maintained.
  • Data Loss Prevention solutions are complex. Encryption is necessary because it protects data.

Email Encryption And DLP – One Solution For FERPA

 

The management of DLP tools requires continuous evaluation and tuning. Many organizations turn on “the basic DLP rules” because of a lack of resources to manage the solution full-time. Hackers know that most security adaptive controls rarely get fully deployed.

Data Loss Prevention identified protected compliance content within the email message in parallel with email encryption. It instilled rules to prevent FERPA-protected data from leaving through the email channel by enacting email encryption to protect information attempting to leave the organization unprotected.

  • Encrypt any email with FERPA-regulated information. Enabling DLP policies as a system-wide adaptive control will ensure all messages that match a FERPA privacy rule with encrypting the outbound message.
  • The organization must enable policies and standards monitoring for risky behavior, external threats, and intentional violation of FERPA.

Email Encryption – Core Necessity For FERPA Compliance

 

School administrators, counselors, and even coaches sending an unencrypted email with student personal information without consent is a FERPA violation. Here are examples of activities school districts perform where email encryption would reduce the impact of alleged FERPA violations:

  • Counselors send unofficial copies of a student’s grades to a local university before getting consent from the parents.
  • A coach sends an athlete’s date of birth, home address, and phone to a prospective college scout via email.
  • School department heads sending blind carbon copy (BCC) send a single email to a group without the recipient email addresses being visible.
  • A teacher inadvertently shared protected information among multiple students.

Email Encryption Solution From Trustifi

Trustifi One-Click Compliance™ and Data Loss Prevention features make it easy to prove FERPA compliance and ensure your data remains secure, even if a student or staff member forgets to encrypt an email manually. The email administrator quickly selects which standards and Data Loss Prevention policies must comply with FERPA. Trustifi’s intelligent AI Engine will scan all outbound emails for sensitive content such as student records and automatically encrypt them.

With Trustifi’s One-Click Compliance™, the solution takes the complexity out of compliance.

For an additional layer of security between potential attackers and your sensitive data, you can request that recipients verify their identities via multi-factor authentication(MFA).

With Trustifi, staff and students can send secure encrypted emails without remembering to click the encrypt email button. Just as quickly, recipients open an encrypted email with a single click even if they don’t have Trustifi themselves.

The administrator sets all the DLP and email encryption policies on the backend to prevent accidental data loss of students’ confidential information being sent externally. Other solutions require users to log in to a portal to access encrypted emails, adding complexity to sending and receiving messages.

“One-Click” Encrypt And Decrypt With Trustifi


Trustifi makes sending and opening emails simpler than ever. No log-ins, portals, or passwords are needed.

 

Groundbreaking Technology Supporting Optical Character Recognition Technology

 

Trustifi’s OCR technology uses machine learning to scan email attachments such as images and PDF files. It recognizes elements such as a credit card scan or a screenshot of a financial statement and categorizes those attachments as sensitive. The attachment files are automatically encrypted, reducing the opportunity for employees/individuals to transmit unprotected confidential material.

 

Emails Get Automatically Scanned

 

The system automatically scans outgoing emails, applies the rules your administrator sets, and then finds the https://trustifi.com/outbound/email-encryption/with no input from the user. This ensures that sensitive data and attachments are not at risk before reaching their intended recipient.

 

Culture

 

Trustifi’s email security services feature a comprehensive suite of email tools for advanced threat protection, easily configurable Data Loss Prevention, and enterprise email encryption. Trustifi’s easy-to-use software is unmatched in its user-friendliness, flexibility, and cost-effectiveness. Trustifi’s time to value, ease of deployment, and lower cost of ownership for SecOps make the company culture secure and a financial match for any client seeking email security, data exfiltration, and message encryption.

Why Trustifi?

Trustifi is a cyber security firm featuring solutions delivered on software as a service platform. Trustifi leads the market with the easiest to use and deploy email security products, providing both inbound and outbound email security from a single vendor.

Trustifi has an extensive roster of clientele throughout North and South America, Europe, and the Asia Pacific. As a global cybersecurity provider of both inbound and outbound email protection, Trustifi currently supports customers from countries including the USA, Canada, Brazil, the Dominican Republic, the UK, the Netherlands, India, the UAE, China, and Japan, Cyprus, the Philippines, and more. The company has also developed “One-Click Compliance” capabilities that cater to world security regulations, including PDPO for Hong Kong, POPI for South Africa, GDPR for Europe, and LGPD for Brazil.

Request A Demo: Trustifi: Email Security Solutions

 

Whether you’re looking for an extra layer of protection in your existing email environment or a complete suite solution, the expertise and simplicity Trustifi offers will exceed your expectations. Let’s talk about a customized email security plan that perfectly fits your needs.