DDoS Attacks: A Growing Cybersecurity Problem in Remote Learning

As remote learning becomes the new normal, distributed denial of service attacks (DDoS) — perhaps the oldest trick in a hacker’s toolbox, is heavily disrupting the education sector by causing long outages. Thomas Bienkowski, Director, Product Marketing at Arbor Network says school leaders can no longer ignore the risks of DDoS attacks that bring e-learning to a standstill. Check out the latest best practices to defend your school networks against these cyber threats. 

The year 2020 has dramatically reshaped our lives in many ways. How we work, shop, exercise, socialize – all of these got overhauled in the strangest of ways during the pandemic. But few aspects changed more than the delivery of education for countless people worldwide. Even as online learning had established itself as a concept over the past decade, nothing prepared us for being entirely online. 

The challenge of delivering a quality education over video conference technology is intuitive and something that societies worldwide confronted head-on to varying degrees of success. However, there’s another set of challenges to online education that are less widely recognized – the challenge posed by those who would prefer to disrupt such delivery. The motivations for this are varied – avoiding homework, shirking tests, and in some cases, a perverse pleasure in denying a quality education to others. Regardless, we heard numerous reports of web teaching sessions getting hijacked or ‘bombed.’ But behind the scenes, there was also a rise in distributed denial of service (DDoS) attacks against the education sector.

DDoS Attacks On a Rise

In the first half of 2020, there was a marked rise in DDoS attacks seen in the education sector. The growth rate within education is higher than the rates we’ve seen in aggregate, supporting the notion that education services saw more targeting, likely related to their prominence through the COVID period.

This can disrupt teachers’ ability to deliver lessons, conduct online tests, access key resources that might be behind a VPN, and for education systems to communicate with their constituencies effectively. In our experience, DDoS attacks have been deployed against key educational resources, such as those used to access schedules, deliver examinations and homework. These systems are often unprotected, and the networks are unable to withstand the extra traffic, leading to the links becoming overloaded. Also, application-layer attacks can lead to poor responses to users of these applications.

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Further, attacks against educational institutions are often unique in the following ways:

• They are often timed to coincide with key dates on the educational calendar, such as the start and end of terms and when exams are conducted.
• They can leverage the computing resources from other educational institutions. Many universities and schools have considerable investments in network capacity and relatively open use policies. Motivated parties can direct these against other institutions.

There are numerous best practices to protect against this, but it all starts with awareness and vigilance. Staying attuned to DDoS attack activity in your region and sector is crucial. Further, if you’re responsible for the availability of such online services, you should be investing in intelligent mitigation solutions that can be deployed close to the critical services you want to stay healthy.

Learn More: Remote Learning Picks Up, So Do Ransomware Attacks: 6 Steps to Manage Risk

How to Thwart DDoS Attacks

It’s a misconception that launching DDoS attacks is something that is reserved for only individuals with technical skills. This is not true. There are many Do-It-Yourself (DIY) and DDoS for Hire tools and services readily available to anyone with a credit card on the open web. These services are simple to use and cost less than a school lunch.

Many schools rely upon a cloud-based DDoS protection service from their ISPs, state network providers, but this isn’t enough. They need to deploy hybrid protection (e.g., a combination of on-premise and cloud-based security) for optimal coverage. 

The misconception that the only motivation for an attacker is to bring down a school’s virtual/online services can be detrimental as there is often another angle, such as financial gain – i.e., the latest DDoS extortion attacks. Like with ransomware, the attacker relies upon the schools’ unpreparedness to defend itself from these attacks. Therefore, schools need to be aware of the latest DDoS attackOpens a new window trends and best practices in defense. Experience shows time and time again that those who are not prepared will be severely impacted. This is especially important to remember during the COVID-19 learn from home scenarios that are being executed worldwide. 

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