A private K-12 academy addresses network security issues to defend against DDoS attacks

"Now, we have a managed circuit from Spectrum Enterprise with the SLA on it. So far, so good. We haven't had any issues, haven’t had any outages. And that makes me very happy, because I just wanted a year of no drama.”— Director of Information Systems

As pandemic conditions eased up in 2021, a K-12 academy decided to return to full-time in-person attendance. That’s when the DDoS attacks began. The K-12 school lost nearly 160 hours of uptime during these attacks that would cripple the school’s network and infrastructure, shutting down all instruction, as well as all back office functions.

The school had a local provider for internet access, and although that provider tried to be responsive, they just didn’t have the tools or the capabilities to assist the school in tracking down the cause of the outages.

Eventually, having ruled out any internal software or hardware issues, the two-man IT team at the school knew that it had to be malicious DDoS attacks that were causing the repeated outages. After tracking students’ traffic on their school-issued Chromebooks, they were able to find the guilty student.

That’s when they called a local IT consulting firm. And then the IT firm called Spectrum Enterprise. The IT consultants recommended Fiber Internet Access (FIA) with DDoS Protection from Spectrum Enterprise.

The school has not experienced any network downtime since the installation.

The solution allows the school’s director of information systems to focus on other critical aspects of his job. “What I really enjoy is introducing educationally relevant technology, so our teachers will have more teaching tools and resources. Now that I don’t have to spend anywhere near the amount of time I used to looking at our network performance, firewall logs and utilization, I can focus more time on that,” he explains.