Dive Brief:

• Distributed Denial of Service (DDoS) attacks from hackers can make Internet connections cease functioning, and getting them back up and running can take days or even weeks.

• Jeff McCune, a network analyst with St. Charles Community Unit School District in St. Charles, IL, faced a DDoS attack and came up with a solution to manually work around the problem, since bids to fix it from outside providers cost upwards of $100,000.

• McCune recommends districts examine their existing options, such as built-in instruction detection and prevention firewalls, that can be installed and utilized to safeguard against attacks.

Dive Insight:

Prevention is key when it comes to handling attacks from hackers, and often districts may have more tech resources at their disposal than they realize. McCune eventually had an automatic system called Border Gateway Protocol (BGP) that roars to life at the first sign of something like a DDoS attack, preventing total district-wide loss of a working internet connection.

According to Wade Billings, the senior director of global IT shared services for the cloud storage company Infrastructure, protecting data can’t be an afterthought, and having a forward-looking security mindset is important. Billings uses the website Bugcrowd.com to recruit “good hackers” in order to find out where certain insecurities lie. “I wanted to go out and find a group of hackers that I could point at our system and say, “Go for it. Approach this as if you were trying to break into us.” And Bug Crowd came to the table with that,” he told Education Dive.

A similar approach was used in the Los Angeles Unified School District, where school administrators considered engaging students who worked around school iPad security to help lock down the devices.