Detecting and preventing DDoS attacks in educational networks

Educational institutions have become prime targets for distributed denial of service (DDoS) attacks due to their vast digital infrastructures, open network policies, diverse user base, and reliance on uninterrupted digital services by students and faculty. These attacks can disrupt virtual classrooms, student portals, and faculty systems, while also acting as a gateway to data breaches involving sensitive student and research information. The resulting operational downtime, reputational damage, and financial loss make it imperative for CISOs to adopt proactive, intelligence-driven defense strategies that ensure service continuity, protect digital assets, and strengthen institutional resilience.

According to Zayo's The State of DDoS Attacks report, education is one of the top five industries targeted by DDoS attacks, accounting for 17% of all attacks in 2023. Moreover, DDoS attacks constitute 5% of all cyberattacks in K-12 schools. According to Netscout, since the pandemic, DDoS attacks are one of the widest ranging threat on an educational institution's information infrastructure, and that the increased network traffic due to virtual classrooms and VPN usage has increased the impact of DDoS attacks.

What is a DDoS attack and why are educational institutions targeted by them?

DDoS attacks in the education industry involve a threat actor overwhelming the target school, college, university, or research institute's network or digital learning environments with a flood of malicious traffic, rendering it inaccessible to legitimate users. These attacks are often launched using botnets, which are networks of compromised devices controlled by attackers. The primary goal of a DDoS attack is to exhaust the educational institution's resources, such as bandwidth, processing power, or memory, leading to service disruption.

The main adversaries include:

• Cybercriminals who demand ransom in exchange for stopping the attack. Attacks like these are called Ransom DDoS.
• Disgruntled insiders such as former and current students, staff, or employees seeking to disrupt operations.
• Hacktivists who attack educational institutions for ideological reasons or to protest policies.

The education industry is a popular target for DDoS attacks due to:

• Data theft and credential harvesting: While DDoS attacks do not directly steal data, they are often used as a diversion tactic to mask other cyberattacks, such as phishing, ransomware deployment, or data breaches targeting student records, financial information, and intellectual property.
• The lure of proprietary information: Universities and research centers hold valuable intellectual property and unpublished research, making them attractive to state-sponsored actors engaged in cyber espionage.
• Open networks with diverse users: Schools and universities have students, faculty, and visitors accessing institutional networks from multiple devices, which further increases the attack surface, making security breaches more likely. This is because not every user knows or follows cybersecurity best practices, making them susceptible to social engineering attacks. Additionally, the varied applications and resources used across departments and roles contribute to shadow IT, further complicating visibility and control for security teams.
• Student-initiated attacks: Some DDoS attacks come from students (for example, the DDoS attack at Miami-Dade Schools caused by a 16-year old student) attempting to delay exams, disrupt school activities, or retaliate against disciplinary actions. Easily available DDoS-for-hire services make it simpler for malicious insiders with minimal technical expertise to launch attacks.
• Disrupting learning and operations: Educational institutions rely heavily on digital platforms for online learning, student portals, research databases, and administrative functions. A well-executed DDoS attack can bring down these critical services, disrupting classes, exams, virtual learning environments, and financial aid systems. Attackers often use these disruptions as leverage to demand ransom or further their malicious agenda. Since ransomware or ransom DDoS attacks severely disrupt academic and administrative operations, institutions feel pressured into paying the ransom to restore services.
• Low cybersecurity posture and insufficient budget: Educational institutions often struggle with weak cybersecurity due to limited budgets, outdated infrastructure, and insufficient security expertise. These gaps make them vulnerable to social engineering attacks, phishing, DDoS, and ransomware. NetScout's report mentioned that The CARES Act (Coronavirus Aid, Relief, and Economic Security) enacted by Congress and the Federal Communications Commission’s E-Rate program allocated funding to ensure that ed-tech vendors provided improved broadband access and connectivity to students, teachers, and institutions. While these funds were also spent on technologies and platforms facilitating remote learning, using a portion of that funding to focus on protecting the availability of those resources (from attacks like DDoS and ransom DDoS) was not always considered. With the average cost of downtime due to application DDoS attacks being as high as $6,130 per minute, an attack like the one Arizona State University suffered can cost universities almost $2.94 million in downtime. So, it's imperative for educational institutions to allocate budget for cybersecurity to prevent future attacks and its consequences.

What are the common types of DDoS attacks affecting schools and universities?

DDoS attacks in education fall into three primary categories based on the layer of the network stack they target:

• Volumetric attacks: These attacks overwhelm a network’s bandwidth with massive amounts of traffic, consuming resources and causing service disruptions and outages. Examples include UDP floods, ICMP floods, and DNS amplification attacks.
• Protocol attacks: These target network protocols by exploiting vulnerabilities in how devices handle connection requests. Examples include SYN floods, Ping of Death, and fragmented packet attacks.
• Application layer attacks: These focus on disrupting specific applications or services such as learning management systems (LMS), authentication portals, or student databases by exhausting server resources and making them inaccessible. Examples include HTTP floods, Slowloris, and credential stuffing attacks.

How do DDoS attacks impact education?

DDoS attacks impact academic institutions in the following ways:

• Disruption of services: Students and faculty cannot access LMS, exams, and other resources, including student portals and library databases, leading to missed classes, delayed coursework submissions, and exam interruptions, significantly impacting students' academic progress.
• Delays in academic and payroll operations: A DDoS attack on administrative platforms will result in downtime affecting admissions and enrollment, grading, and financial transactions.
• Financial loss: Institutions might face financial losses due to disruptions in tuition payments and online transactions. Additionally, institutions often suffer costs related to IT remediation, infrastructure upgrades, cybersecurity enhancements, and potential legal fees.
• Reputation damage: Repeated or high-profile attacks can harm the institution’s reputation, potentially affecting student enrollment and staff recruitment.
• Data breaches: Personal and financial information of students and staff can be compromised, leading to privacy concerns and potential identity theft.

These reasons highlight the need for CISOs to implement robust cybersecurity measures in educational institutions to protect against such attacks.

How do you calculate the financial loss from a DDoS attack affecting educational institutions?

Educational institutions and enterprises can calculate financial losses from DDoS attacks based on a combination of three metrics: direct costs, indirect costs, and long-term financial impact.

1. Direct costs (Immediate financial impact)

Direct costs refer to the tangible costs incurred during and immediately after the attack.

• Revenue loss: If an educational institution charges for online courses or exam registrations, a DDoS attack disrupting these services results in lost revenue. This is calculated as:

  Revenue loss = (Downtime in hours) × (Revenue per hour)

• Incident response costs: Expenses related to IT teams, cybersecurity experts, forensic investigations, and emergency mitigation efforts.
• Ransom payments: If attackers demand a ransom (DDoS-for-Hire or Ransom DDoS), any paid amount is a direct financial loss.
• Infrastructure costs: Expenses to scale up network resources (for example, cloud-based mitigation, bandwidth expansion) to handle the attack.

2. Indirect costs (Operational and reputational impact)

These are costs that the institutions will face due to factors such as operational disruptions, and the impact of the DDoS attack on customer trust and third-party vendors or partners.

• Loss of employee productivity: If faculty (both teaching and administrative), students, or IT teams are unable to perform their tasks, organizations should calculate lost work hours.

  Lost productivity cost = (Affected employees) × (Average hourly wage) × (Downtime hours)

• Regulatory fines and legal costs: Educational institutions must comply with data protection regulations (for example, the GDPR, FERPA, COPPA). A breach might result in penalties or lawsuits.
• Reputation damage and lost users: A prolonged attack might erode trust, causing current students, staff, and potential students to lose confidence. It can also result in a loss of partnership with ed-tech platforms.

3. Long-term financial impact

These are factors which will impact the costs educational institutions face over time.

• Cyber insurance costs: Educational enterprises will be charged higher premiums for cyber liability insurance after an attack.
• Cost of future cybersecurity investments: Expenses on upgrading DDoS protection solutions such as web application firewalls (WAF), CDNs, and AI-driven traffic monitoring tools, improving network resilience, and training staff.

Sample calculation of DDoS attack cost in an educational institution

Daily revenue: $100,000
Downtime: 5 hours
Affected employees: 50
Average salary per hour: $25
Incident response costs: $20,000
Reputation and compliance loss estimate: $50,000
Increased cyber insurance costs: $25,000
Future cybersecurity investments (inclusive of employee training): $40,000

Total financial impact calculation:

Revenue per hour = (100,000 / 24) = $4,166.67
Revenue loss = $4,166.67 × 5 = $20,833.35
Loss of productivity = $25 × 50 × 5 = $6,250
Total cost = $20,833.35 + $6,250 + $20,000 + $50,000 + $25,000 + $40,000 = $162,083.35
Total estimated loss: $162,083.35

Clearly, DDoS attacks in education can result in significant financial losses beyond just immediate disruptions. Implementing proactive monitoring, automated threat detection, and DDoS mitigation solutions is essential to minimize these losses.

How do you detect DDoS attacks in education?

It's crucial for educational institutions to detect DDoS attacks early to minimize downtime and mitigate the damage caused by these attacks. Educational enterprises can detect DDoS attacks in the following ways:

Monitoring for unusual traffic patterns

• Sudden traffic spikes: A dramatic and unexpected increase in network traffic, especially during non-peak hours, might indicate a DDoS attack.
• Irregular access requests: An unusual number of connection requests from a single IP address or a range of unknown sources could be a sign of malicious activity.
• Unusual geographic locations: If an institution primarily serves a local or national student base, a surge in traffic from foreign countries could be suspicious.

Analyzing network performance metrics

• High latency: A noticeable slowdown in network speed or prolonged response times from servers can signal an ongoing attack.
• Frequent time-outs: If students, faculty, or staff experience repeated failures in accessing online resources, it could be due to excessive traffic overloading the system.
• Service unavailability: Sudden disruptions in essential services like LMS, email servers, or online portals might be the result of a volumetric attack.

Using intrusion detection and prevention systems

• Early DDoS identification: Deploying IDS/IPS solutions help to identify and block DDoS attempts before they impact critical systems.
• Signature-based detection: These systems analyze traffic patterns and detect anomalies based on predefined rules and real-time behavioral analytics. They also rely on signature databases to identify specific attack patterns.

Using deep packet inspection

• Packet content analysis: Deep packet inspection (DPI) tools inspect the contents of network packets to differentiate between legitimate and malicious requests.
• Botnet traffic detection: DPI can help identify botnet traffic, SYN flood attacks, or UDP amplification attempts, all of which are common techniques used in DDoS attacks.

Leveraging UEBA-integrated SIEM solutions

• Comprehensive log analysis: SIEM solutions are capable of ingesting and analyzing logs from multiple sources including firewalls, IDS, IPS, DNS, web servers, and more.
• Cross-device correlation: A SIEM can correlate security events across multiple devices and generate alerts when suspicious traffic is detected.
• Threat intelligence integration: It also integrates with threat intelligence platforms and helps in cross-referencing inbound traffic with known botnets and blocklisted IP addresses.
• ML-based alerting: UEBA in SIEM solutions establishes normal traffic patterns and identifies anomalies such as sudden spikes in network traffic, abnormal login attempts, or excessive requests to a single resource, which usually indicates a DDoS attack and alerts the security teams about them.

How do you prevent and mitigate DDoS attacks in education?

Preventing DDoS attacks requires a combination of proactive measures, effective tools, and continuous monitoring. Here are some best practices:

1. Deploy a DDoS protection solution: Use a specialized DDoS protection service or appliance that can detect and mitigate attacks in real-time. These solutions often include both on-premises and cloud-based components. Additionally, adopt CDN and enable DNS protection. While CDNs reduce the risk of a single-point attack by distributing web traffic across multiple geographically dispersed servers, secure DNS services like using Anycast to distribute queries prevent attackers from exploiting vulnerabilities in the educational institution’s domain name system and avoid single-point failures.

2. Strengthen network infrastructure: Deploy IDS and IPS solutions to detect and block malicious traffic before it reaches the network. Implement load balancing and reduce network redundancy by using multiple data centers and diversifying your internet service providers. This can help distribute the traffic load and mitigate the impact of an attack. Institutions should also configure rate limiting on their network (routers and firewalls) and application servers to control the number of requests allowed within a specific time frame. This can help prevent servers from becoming overwhelmed by malicious traffic.

3. Implement zero trust security: It's crucial for educational institutions to continuously verify user identity before granting network access. Enforce MFA and role-based access control to protect access to critical systems and services, and reduce the risk of botnet infections by restricting unknown or unmanaged devices from connecting to academic networks. Institutions should also close vulnerable entry points that attackers can exploit, such as open ports and unnecessary services.

4. Traffic filtering: Use traffic filtering techniques such as IP blocklisting and allowlisting to block traffic from known malicious sources and allow only legitimate traffic.

5. Regular software updates: Ensure all software, such as operating systems, firewalls, and applications, are regularly updated with the latest security patches. This practice effectively seals potential vulnerabilities that could be exploited by attackers.

6. Implement a WAF: A WAF can help protect your web applications by scrutinizing and filtering HTTP traffic between the web application and the internet. You should also enforce strong access controls by restricting administrative access to critical network components to prevent unauthorized modifications.

7. Network segmentation: Divide your network into smaller, isolated segments to limit the impact of a DDoS attack. This can help contain the attack to a specific segment and prevent it from affecting the entire educational network.

8. Monitor traffic patterns: Continuously monitor your network traffic patterns to identify anomalies that might indicate a potential DDoS attack. Deploy SIEM, AI and ML tools that provide proactive monitoring with real-time analytics and alerts.

9. Develop a DDoS incident response plan: Create and maintain a comprehensive incident response plan that outlines the steps to take in the event of a DDoS attack, including automated failover strategies. This should include communication protocols, roles and responsibilities, and recovery procedures. Educational institutions should also consider conducting regular security drills involving DDoS attack simulations to test their response capabilities and improve reaction times.

10. Educate employees: Train employees on the importance of cybersecurity and how to recognize signs of a DDoS attack. Encourage students to use secure networks and avoid sharing credentials.

By implementing these best practices, educational institutions can enhance their resilience against DDoS attacks and minimize the risk of disruption to their services.

Additional resources

Exploring the methodology of DDoS attacks and their mitigation strategies

Combating DDoS, Ransomware, and Cryptojacking

ABCs of DNS, DHCP, and IPAM security

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