Back to School!
Cyber attacks top the list of unexpected challenges for returning students this Fall.
For the thousands of school districts forced to begin the 2020/2021 school year with online learning, due to COVID-19, the frustration has been whipped into a frenzy due to slow websites and complete outages. Most of these problems are due to inadequate provisioning of capacity, but many events are the result of cyber-attacks.
The COVID-19 pandemic forced many US education leaders to opt for virtual learning this Fall. The hope being that it would stave of the spread of infection amongst students, educators, and those with whom they associate. Mass confusion and disorientation affected students and parents alike when attempting to access these resources on week one. The problem was compounded by slow performance of the online platforms and in many cases complete outages.
The cause of these performance problems was not always a lack of capacity, but rather malicious intent. In Miami-Dade County in Florida, systems were embattled by dozens of cyberattacks. The attacks were a form of cyber-attack in which the perpetrator seeks to make a resource unavailable by flooding the service with superfluous requests. This attack results in making it unavailable to process legitimate requests. This is called a denial-of-service attack. This particular attack was committed by a 16-year-old student.
The takeaway here is that an attack that can affect important systems can be performed by nearly anyone for nearly any reason and have significant consequences, especially when they are least desirable. Not only are their no rules in cybercrime but those targeted often believe they are not a likely target.
So, should we accept this as the new norm? Certainly not. We can prevent these attacks. There must be more awareness around the risk of attacks and subsequent damages. Today, the capability that exists to defend against malicious activity is effective but complicated and expensive. Centristic is working to democratize cyber-security so that it is affordable and easily managed. We are focused on changing small and medium-sized companies’ reactionary posture to one of preparedness. We can do this today