Solution Vertical Brief: DDoS Protection for Education

DDoS Protection Solutions for

Educational Organizations
A Dual Threat from Inside and Outside
Organizations in the education sector are experiencing a significant digital transformation,
including a growing reliance on technology to deliver teaching, instruction and student
services. With the increasing adoption of remote instruction, testing and online student
portals, the availability and seamless operation of educational applications and services
have become paramount.

Educational institutions are required to provide uninterrupted access to learning information

and services to ensure timely and efficient student services. Any disruption to these
essential systems due to DDoS attacks can have severe consequences, jeopardize
teaching and testing, compromise data integrity, and affect the reputation of the institution.

The evolving threat landscape of DDoS attacks adds to the concerns of educational
organizations. Cybercriminals are continuously adapting their tactics, leveraging
sophisticated attack vectors to exploit vulnerabilities.

By proactively defending against and mitigating DDoS attacks, schools, universities and
research institutions can focus on their primary missions of teaching, instruction, research
and maintaining uninterrupted operations.

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 Solution Vertical Brief: DDoS Protection for Education

DDoS Attack Campaigns Against Educational Institutions

One of the biggest shifts in the DDoS threat landscape in recent times is the rise of state-
sponsored and hacktivist groups and the emergence of political rather than financial
motivations for DDoS attacks. As a result, the profile of targeted victims has expanded to
include government institutions, civilian infrastructure and non-profit organizations. Sadly,
this has also meant an increase in DDoS attacks against schools, universities and other
educational institutions.

One such high-profile attack was the campaign July 24, 2023, by Anonymous Sudan that
targeted 10 universities’ websites in Kenya, including Egerton University, Dedan Kimathi
University of Technology, Technical University of Mombasa, South Eastern Kenya
University, Chuka University and more.

Another example was the campaign against university websites in Australia by the
pro-Russian hacker group Killnet, and their affiliate, Anonymous Sudan. The threat
actors called for additional attacks against eight universities, 10 airports and eight
hospital websites in Australia beginning on Tuesday, March 28, 2023.

Israel's major universities were also targeted, including Tel Aviv University, Hebrew
University, Bar Ilan University, Haifa University, Ben Gurion University, The Technion,
The Weizmann Institute, Ariel University and Reichman University. The attack disrupted
access to the websites, but it was unclear whether the hackers gained access to any of
the targeted internal systems of the universities.

The provided instances illustrate a growing trend where schools, universities, and similar
educational establishments become prime targets for state-sponsored and hacktivist
collectives. These attacks stem not from the institutions' own actions, but rather from
wider geopolitical occurrences, localized conflicts, and religious frictions. Despite their
unrelated origins, these cases underscore the education sector's vulnerability to DDoS
attacks, necessitating proactive protective measures.

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How DDoS Attacks Harm Educational Institutions

The rise of DDoS attacks pose a grave threat to educational institutions, causing
disruptions and compromising class instruction, teaching and student safety.

DDoS attacks can cause significant harm to education and research institutes in various
ways, such as:

À Disruption of Teaching Services: DDoS attacks can overwhelm the network

infrastructure and targeted servers, leading to service disruptions. Educational
institutions increasingly rely on remote teaching, online instruction and online
student participation for basic educational activity. Any disruption to these services
can hinder classroom instruction, testing or knowledge sharing.
À Interruption of Testing: For schools and universities, online testing is a mission-
critical capability, vital for the seamless operation of the academic institution.
DDoS attacks disrupt mid-terms, standardized tests and other testing functions,
critically hindering the smooth flow of the academic year.
À Cover-Up of Data Breach Attempts: Some DDoS attacks serve as a
smokescreen to divert attention while hackers attempt to breach the institution's
security and access sensitive student data. Such attacks can lead to data
breaches and expose private information of students and staff, resulting in legal
and regulatory consequences, financial penalties and damage to the institution's
reputation.
À Financial Losses: DDoS attacks can result in significant financial losses for
educational institutions. The costs associated with mitigating the attack, restoring
services and implementing additional security measures can be substantial. The
loss of revenue due to service disruptions and potential student churn can further
impact the institution's bottom line.
À Damage to Brand Reputation: A successful DDoS attack on a school or
university can erode the trust and confidence of parents and future students.
The negative publicity and perception of compromised data security may lead
to potential students looking to competing institutions, impacting the institution's
reputation and brand.

Overall, DDoS attacks pose a severe threat to educational institutions, not only in
terms of immediate teaching and testing disruptions but also in terms of long-term
consequences related to student and staff safety, data security, financial stability
and reputation.

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 Solution Vertical Brief: DDoS Protection for Education

By proactively defending against and mitigating DDoS attacks,

educational institutions can focus on their primary mission of
providing exceptional classroom instruction while preserving the
integrity of sensitive student data.

Radware’s Solution for the Education Sector

Radware's DDoS protection solution for educational institutions offers a comprehensive
and tailored approach to safeguarding their critical infrastructure.

Key benefits of Radware’s DDoS Protection Solution include:

À Protection Against Any DDoS Attack: Radware's solution provides real-time

detection and mitigation of both known and zero-day DDoS attacks, ensuring
that the institution’s networks and services remain accessible and resilient. By
leveraging cutting edge technologies such as behavioral analysis and machine
learning, Radware's solution can accurately identify and mitigate all DDoS threats.
À Scalable and Resilient Infrastructure: Radware offers a highly scalable,
resilient and multi-terabit infrastructure that can handle high-volume DDoS
attacks without service disruption. With globally distributed scrubbing centers and
intelligent traffic diversion mechanisms, Radware ensures that legitimate traffic
reaches academic institutions while malicious traffic is efficiently filtered out.
À Flexible Deployment Options: Radware provides educational institutions with
multiple deployment options, including on-premises protection, cloud services,
and a hybrid solution that combines on-premises and cloud-based DDoS
protection, leveraging the low latency of hardware deployment and the scalability
of the cloud.
À Low False Positives: Unlike competing solutions, which detect DDoS attacks
using volumetric detection or signatures of known attack patterns, Radware
uses behavioral-based detection using advanced, patented machine-learning
algorithms to protect against known and unknown threats. Radware uses
machine-learning algorithms to automatically distinguish between legitimate user
traffic and attack traffic. This allows for more accurate detection with lower rates of
false positives.
À Advanced Web DDoS protection: Radware’s dedicated Web DDoS protection
use advanced L7 behavioral-based detection and mitigation to block sophisticated
Web DDoS Tsunami attacks that threaten the availabily of web and mobile
applications.
À Integrated Network and Application Protection: Radware’s DDoS protections
are integrated within a single cloud solution so that customers can cover all their
infrastructure and application protection needs in one integrated solution.

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À Real-Time Threat Intelligence: Radware’s DDoS protections are augmented

by multiple threat intelligence feeds, which aggregate data from Radware’s cloud
scrubbing network and a network of dedicated honeypots, actively detects new
attackers before they ever hit the customers. This way, Radware customers
benefit from the crowdsourced intelligence of Radware’s entire customer base.
À Comprehensive Reporting and Analytics: Radware's solution provides detailed
reporting and analytics capabilities, offering valuable insights into attack trends in
the educational sector. Attack mitigation effectiveness, and network performance.
These insights enable informed decision-making, continuous improvement of
security strategies, and compliance with regulatory requirements.

Managed Services and Attack-Time Protection

Radware’s DDoS protection solution is provided as a fully managed service and is
supported by Radware’s Emergency Response Team (ERT). Radware’s ERT provides
customers with a single point of contact for both their routine and emergency needs,
ensuring better security and lower overhead than doing it by themselves.

Radware’s Global Scrubbing Network

Radware’s Cloud DDoS Protection Service is backed by a worldwide network of
19 scrubbing centers, with 12 Tbps of mitigation capacity (and growing). Radware’s
scrubbing centers are globally connected in full mesh mode, using Anycast-based
routing, which ensures that the DDoS attacks are mitigated closest to their point of
origin and provides truly global DDoS mitigation capable of absorbing even the largest
volumetric attacks.

Figure 1
Radware’s Global
Cloud DDoS
Scrubbing Network

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Summary
Educational institutions face critical challenges when it comes to protecting their digital
infrastructure. DDoS attacks pose a threat that can compromise academic operations,
data security and financial stability, leading to severe long-term consequences.

Radware's DDoS protection solution provides a comprehensive approach to

safeguarding critical infrastructure with benefits such as real-time detection, scalability,
flexible deployment options, low false positives, integration with network and application
protection, advanced web DDoS protection, real-time threat intelligence, and
comprehensive reporting and analytics.

With a fully managed service and a global scrubbing network, Radware ensures
academic institutions' networks and services remain accessible and resilient.

This document is provided for information purposes only. This document is not warranted to be error-free, nor subject to any other warranties or conditions,
whether expressed orally or implied in law. Radware specifically disclaims any liability with respect to this document and no contractual obligations are formed
either directly or indirectly by this document. The technologies, functionalities, services, or processes described herein are subject to change without notice.

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RW-1229 | 22/08/23