Many districts are still looking for ways to combat these sophisticated cyberattacks, which aim to shut down their school networks.
What Is a Denial of Service Attack, and How Does It Affect K–12 Institutions?
A denial of service attack is a cyberattack in which the attacker floods the target system with requests as a means to grind activity to a halt.
“Imagine I take a fistful of $100 bills and go to Times Square, and I stand in the middle of traffic and throw them into the air. What do you think is going to happen? Everything stops,” says Sven Dietrich, IEEE member and a professor at New York’s Hunter College. “The same can happen in a network environment: A web server, a file server, an authentication server, those are no longer performing their activities as originally planned.”
A distributed denial-of-service attack “comes from multiple locations, which makes it harder to block and therefore more effective at flooding systems or networks,” says Amy McLaughlin, cybersecurity program director for the Consortium for School Networking. “When these attacks are used against schools and districts, students and teachers cannot access the systems and do their daily business of teaching and learning.”
One of the challenges is that these types of attacks “can be purchased relatively inexpensively as a service,” McLaughlin says.