As the Technology Director of New Jersey’s Freehold Regional High School District (FRHD) in Western Monmouth County, Dan Markese is the first point of contact for all the district’s IT needs. Covering six different high schools throughout the county, which includes 12,000 students, 1,000 teachers, and approximately 500 support staff, Markese oversees all day-to-day tech needs such as WAN, phones, fax services, and internet connection. And with the school’s BYOD policy, he has to track, monitor, and ensure the secure connection of 20,000 individual devices to the district’s network.

Like many school districts, the FRHD has benefitted from the technological advances offered by the internet and has fully embraced its use for phone services, student management systems, course plans, grading, testing, and more. Any disruptions to these functions affect the entire school community.

That’s why, when the high school’s network started to lose connectivity — every day, at the same time — the entire district was impacted. Parents could not see students’ daily progress; students could not view their grades; teachers were not able to access grade books, lesson plans, or teaching tools. Just a few minutes of downtime negatively affected the abilities, efficiency and safety of the schools. “It was crippling us, and I knew I had to take action,” Markese said of the outages.

In troubleshooting the problem, Markese identified an abundant amount of traffic coming through the firewall as a distributed denial of service (DDoS) attack. DDoS cyber-attacks can wreak havoc on networks, causing them to slow to a crawl or wholly immobilize for upwards of eight hours on average.

Any business, school system, or government entity with a web presence is at risk for (DDoS) attacks. In fact, research shows school networks have been targeted specifically to test attacks later used in larger scale strikes on higher value targets, such as a stock exchange.

Like many DDoS attacks, the ones on FRHD were launched not by elite hackers, but by students using apps on their phones originally designed to disable the Internet connectivity of competitors in the online gaming community. These apps are easily adapted to create other types of malicious attacks.

DDoS attacks are not hard to deploy because they are effortless and nontechnical. Attack tools are established in an open-source location and form quickly. Consequently, they become cheap, even free, to obtain.

The number of DDoS attacks in Q2 2017 increased significantly compared to the same quarters in 2015 and 2016. Which is why attacks on the high schools in the Freehold Regional High School District were getting bigger and more frequent. The internet was shutting down for a crippling 10 to 15 minutes numerous times a day, every day. According to Markese, the connections going out to the internet were “jammed with malicious traffic,” leading him to realize he needed an upstream solution he could rely on. So, he signed up for Altice DDoS protection service.

Once the district went live with Altice DDoS protection, the schools have not experienced any downtime “whatsoever.” Although Dan Markese consults his report regularly and sees attempted attacks coming in and increasing (about 30 from August to November 2017), the school's network remains unaffected because the attacks are blocked and mitigated by Altice’s Managed DDoS Protection Service solution.

Altice's in-cloud solution performs inbound DDoS detection on all of your internet traffic. During an attack, Managed DDoS Protection Service identifies and re-routes suspect data away from the network so that it can be cleansed and analyzed without disturbance to daily routines.

With internet access being more mission-critical than ever for all educational institutions, the deployment of DDoS protection is imperative -- even if a school has yet to be hit.

Altice Business’s cloud-based solution provides 24/7 DDoS monitoring, automated attack mitigation, and the expert support the Freehold Regional High School District needed to prevent costly downtime and service interruption and to gain peace of mind.