GUIDELINES FOR PROTECTING SCHOOLS AGAINST DDOS ATTACKS
DDoS attacks on the rise: protect your school infrastructure
As the COVID pandemic rages on, schools are relying more than ever on digital learning platforms to ensure educational continuity. In February 2021, the CCB distributed guidelines to Belgian schools with recommendations to protect the school network infrastructure against DDoS attacks.
Schools that have not received these guidelines can obtain them upon request at info@ccb.belgium.be.
Tips to protect yourself
The tips are written for school IT managers and offer possible protection measures against DDoS attacks. These guidelines are intended to prepare schools for DDoS attacks and make the school network infrastructure resilient to this cyber attack.
The guide consists of two parts and a summary. The first part deals with actions that a school's IT manager can take on their own initiative. The second part gives an overview of the anti-DDoS products available on the market.
Protection measures against DDoS attacks do not guarantee 100% network availability. Therefore, it is equally important to start a dialogue with students and their parents about the potential damage and consequences of a DDoS attack.
What is a DDoS attack?
In a DDoS attack, or "distributed denial of service" attack, cybercriminals attempt to sabotage a server by overloading it with page requests. The server is then unable to process this amount of requests to the point where the website is no longer accessible until the attack stops or is countered. In schools, too, this type of attack can have a significant impact on the operation of online tools such as a digital learning platform.