It’s not always sophisticated criminal syndicates at work, but sometimes merely a 14-year-old with a smartphone wreaking havoc on a school’s tech systems. DDoS (Distributed Denial of Service) attacks can be launched by bad actors to overwhelm the systems capacity of a website to handle traffic, thus shutting it down. One possible result can be that schools are unable to perform basic operations, and the school day grinds to a halt.
Local View: Cybersecurity and our schools | Columnists
Schools have been working hard to address myriad cybersecurity issues. Nebraska’s Educational Service Units are a source for technical expertise and consultative support as well as information exchange among ESU tech experts and school district technology directors to ensure best practices are enacted.
The ESU COOP purchasing program is an excellent source of support to schools by negotiating statewide buys and discounted prices for key products such as website monitoring and security awareness tools.
Some salient cybersecurity takeaways applicable to educational entities, businesses, and nonprofits:
* Multi-factor authentication or the requirement that an individual user signing on must acknowledge and enter a time-sensitive login key code from a separate device than the initial login workstation. MFA is a necessary but not sufficient step in information security.
* Offsite or air-gap backup systems for retaining key information are an essential security step to ensure that if a network is hit or a campus based server is decimated by natural disaster, systems functions can be restored with a close-to-real-time backup.
Gloss