FERPA¶
Summary¶
Regulation: Family Educational Rights and Privacy Act
Abbreviation: FERPA
Governs these parties: all educational institutions that receive funding from the U.S. Department of Education
Enforced by: U.S. Department of Education. Specifically, the Family Policy Compliance Office (FPCO)
Details¶
The Family Educational Rights and Privacy Act (FERPA) is a federal law that protects the privacy of student's educational records. FERPA applies to all educational institutions that receive funding from the U.S. Department of Education, including public schools, private schools, and post-secondary institutions. The law provides students with the right to access their own educational records and requires educational institutions to obtain written permission from students before releasing any information from their educational records.
FERPA also requires educational institutions to keep educational records confidential and secure. Parents or guardians of a student who is under 18 years old may access their child's educational records, but the student has the right to opt-out of having their directory information disclosed. Additionally, educational institutions may disclose educational records without consent in certain circumstances, such as to comply with a court order or to protect the health and safety of students.
The rest of this document is designed to help our community understand FERPA better by outlining the following information.
How it Relates to Cybersecurity¶
FERPA mandates that educational institutions must keep educational records confidential and secure. This essentially means that educational institutions must take appropriate cybersecurity measures to ensure that the sensitive information contained in students' educational records is protected from unauthorized access, theft, or data breaches.
Educational institutions must implement security measures such as firewalls, intrusion detection and prevention systems, and encryption to safeguard student records. They must also have procedures in place to detect, respond to, and recover from security incidents. Failure to comply with FERPA's cybersecurity requirements can result in penalties such as loss of federal funding, lawsuits, and reputational damage.
Furthermore, with the increasing use of digital tools and online platforms for teaching and learning, educational institutions must ensure that these technologies comply with FERPA's cybersecurity requirements. This includes vetting third-party providers of online services to ensure that they also implement appropriate cybersecurity measures to protect students' educational records.
How Coro Handles Compliance for You¶
At Coro, we've done the research thoroughly and regularly track updates to the regulation in order to ensure that you are implementing best practices in the areas we cover when we're protecting your systems.
The following table outlines the requirements described by FERPA that Coro implements in conjunction with Microsoft 365 or Google Workspace.
Disclaimer
This table does not guarantee that your organization is compliant with these regulations. As a best practice, seek assistance from a certified auditor when completing your analysis.
| Category | Requirement | How Coro does it |
|---|---|---|
| Cloud Security & Privacy | Malware and ransomware injection | Detects and remediates malware and ransomware files in cloud drives |
| Cloud app account takeover | Monitors access to cloud apps and user/admin activities on them | |
| Multi-Factor Authentication (MFA) | Enforces multi-factor authentication on cloud app access | |
| Data governance over cloud drives | Data loss prevention (DLP) for regulatory and business-sensitive data | |
| Audit and activity logs | Archives all system activities for a period of seven years, supporting referencing and auditing | |
| Email Security & Privacy | Generic and spear phishing | Detects and remediates social engineering attacks based on email content analysis |
| Identity spoofing | Detects and remediates social engineering attacks based on adaptive identity monitoring | |
| Malware and ransomware injection | Detects and remediates malware and ransomware in email attachments | |
| Email account takeover | Detects and remediates email attacks from within the organization | |
| DLP over outgoing/incoming email | Encrypts emails before they are sent, which are then decrypted by their recipients at the other end | |
| End to end email encryption | Emails are encrypted before they are sent, then decrypted by their recipients at the other end./td> | |
| Network Security | Virtual Firewall | Controls and monitors network traffic between virtual machines or resources hosted on the Internet. |
| Zero Trust Network Access | Identifies and authenticates users and devices seeking access to a network, regardless of whether they are inside or outside the perimeter of the network. | |
| Audit and activity logs | Referencing and archiving for audit all system activities for a period of seven years. | |
| Endpoint Security & Privacy | Malware and ransomware | Anti-virus (AV) for signature-based detection and remediation of files with high risk content |
| DLP on endpoint devices | Provides data loss prevention (DLP) for business-sensitive data and data defined as sensitive by regulations | |
| Audit and activity logs | Archives all system activities for a period of seven years, supporting referencing and auditing | |
| Data Governance | Data distribution governance and role management | Provides data loss prevention (DLP) for data defined as sensitive by regulations |
| PII monitoring | Monitor for Personally identifiable information, or PII, which is information that can be used to identify, contact, or distinguish one unique person from another | |
| Audit and activity logs | Archives all system activities for a period of seven years, supporting referencing and auditing |