La Mirada, Calif., and El Centro, Calif., March 10, 2022 — CENIC and K12HSN today announced that CENIC’s new defenses against distributed denial of service attacks have provided vital support for California’s K-12 institutions, preventing disruption of online teaching, learning, and operations at a time of increasing reliance on network connectivity due to the COVID-19 pandemic.
More than one-third of the 43 K-12 sites activated for use of CENIC’s managed DDoS Mitigation Solution experienced a DDoS attack in 2021, according to year-end data for the program. During the same time, CENIC’s managed DMS blocked a total of 98.6 terabytes of attack traffic. Riverside County Office of Education recorded the largest peak attack of the year with two 100-Gigabit-per-second attacks. Orange County Department of Education was the most frequently attacked site with 42 attack events, and Fresno County Superintendent of Schools had the largest amount of blocked attack traffic with 46.7 terabytes.
“The impact of the cyberattacks to school sites was minimized due to prompt detection and response by both CENIC network operations staff and K-12 site contacts,” said K12HSN CEO Luis Wong. “We are excited for schools to have the opportunity to participate in this innovative mitigation service.”
“Working together with our members to mitigate DDoS attacks protects and maintains their overall network performance, and as we grow this service, it will benefit the other segments of the CENIC community,” said CENIC’s President and CEO Louis Fox.
When a DDoS attack caused a loss of service to the internet for students, teachers, and administrators at the Fowler Unified School District, network services at Fresno CSS contacted CENIC for help. After CENIC engineers provided access to the managed DMS, the district was up and running in less than 30 minutes. “Without access to the DMS, the attack could have impacted connectivity to the Fowler district for days,” said Fresno CSS Network Services Analyst Jamie Samarco.
Riverside COE registered morphing multi-vector DDoS attacks over the course of about a month. The 100-Gbps attacks at Riverside COE would have impacted all internet-dependent services for the entire COE if mitigation protection had not been enabled. “CENIC’s set of mitigation tools has been invaluable,” said Jared Ellis, telecommunications and network architect for Riverside COE. “We’d love to see the program grow.”
“CENIC’s DMS is more cost-effective than other mitigation products and has offered a streamlined onboarding process due to CENIC’s historic relationship with the K-12 educational community,” said Don Nguyen, network and telecommunications manager for the Orange County Department of Education.
Through CENIC’s Internet2 membership, CENIC is able to contract for Radware’s on-demand, cloud-based DMS. The costs for the services delivered to K-12 agencies are supported by the California Department of Education through the K12HSN program. K-12 school districts enjoy the benefit of an integrated DMS through their county office as part of their connection to K12HSN and CENIC’s California Research and Education Network (CalREN). To date, 48 K-12 sites receive CENIC’s DMS. For more information on how to take advantage of CENIC’s DMS, contact the CENIC Network Operations Center at noc@cenic.org.
About K12HSN • www.k12hsn.org
K12HSN is a state program funded annually and overseen by the California Department of Education. The California Department of Education competitively selected the Imperial County Office of Education (ICOE) as the Local Education Agency (LEA) and manager of the K-12 High Speed Network program. K12HSN provides the K-12 California LEAs with network connectivity, internet services, and teaching and learning application coordination.
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