Educational institutions often face greater cybersecurity challenges than other organizations. With numerous stakeholders to appease and goals to accomplish, schools and school boards can be forgiven if cybersecurity isn’t always their primary concern. With Deep Freeze Cloud, administrators, teachers and parents don’t have to worry about cybersecurity; this Faronics offering is the ideal solution.
Cybersecurity and Education
Cybersecurity is an issue that concerns us all, as individuals and as organizations. Every company, agency and institution should have a plan to protect their data and systems. For the education sector, this need is greater. First, schools often deal with sensitive, personal information, and this is especially true for schools that teach children. Protecting kids is always of the utmost importance.
Apart from the objective of keeping students, teachers and administrators safe, there are reasons cybersecurity is a particularly important and thorny issue for schools. Some of these issues include:
The Popularity of Schools as Targets
Cybercriminals, hackers and other threat actors often view educational institutions as potentially easy targets. This is largely because of budgetary constraints, real or perceived. Many school boards don’t have huge budgets and they may not be able to invest much in cybersecurity. For-profit schools may make similar financial decisions, leaving themselves vulnerable to cyberattacks.
Hackers know this. If they can infect a multi-billion-dollar corporation with ransomware — malware that makes data and systems inaccessible until the victim pays the demanded ransom — they could potentially earn a huge payoff. However, such business goliaths typically invest heavily in their cybersecurity, making the odds of succeeding with an attack minimal.
A school with a modest budget, however, is an easier target. Schools often use older hardware and software, and they may not perform regular security audits of their networks. It’s unfortunate that hackers are so unscrupulous as to target schools simply because they perceive them as easy victims, but that’s why they’re criminals.
Internal Threats
Educational institutions can’t only worry about external attacks. Sometimes the call comes from inside the house. For schools, there are several ways that internal changes to networks or workstations can wreak havoc.
First, students often make unauthorized changes to workstations. This can be especially true of young students. These changes are rarely malicious; kids like to play around on computers and may not even be aware that they’re doing anything harmful. Having a way to revert workstations back to a predetermined safe state is crucial for schools.
Sometimes these changes are malicious, though. A cyberattack such as ransomware is a for-profit operation. Sophisticated organized crime syndicates often execute these attacks, but not all hackers do it for the money; some just think it’s fun. This can be especially true of teenage students who might want to mess with their school’s network as revenge for a punishment or simply for the thrill of mischief.
Last, sometimes teachers and administrators make honest mistakes. Unfortunately, these mistakes can be just as damaging as malicious attacks. Unauthorized changes and exposed vulnerabilities can cause significant drops in productivity and cost a lot to fix. This further underlines the value of a cybersecurity solution that can reset workstations to a safe state.
Multiple Locations = More Exposure
The cybersecurity issues facing schools with a single campus with one room of computers are daunting enough. For schools with multiple campuses or with remote and hybrid learning environments, the potential exposure is significantly greater.
Every workstation is a possible entry point for a hacker. This means that an institution with various campuses and buildings needs endpoint security to prevent data breaches. This need is further increased for schools with remote learning classes. With students and faculty accessing a school’s network from multiple, sometimes disparate, locations, data security can be remarkably precarious.
How Deep Freeze Cloud Solves These Cybersecurity Challenges
Deep Freeze offers various solutions to the myriad cybersecurity issues facing educational institutions. First, there’s anti-malware protection that can detect, prevent and remove malware threats in real time. There’s also a desktop lockdown feature that restricts access to specific computer files and applications. This prevents unauthorized changes to system settings.
Deep Freeze Cloud also offers application whitelisting, meaning you can approve which applications can run on your systems. To avoid data loss, you can also restrict specific functionalities with advanced system security measures, preventing unauthorized data access or transfer. However, the crown jewel of Deep Freeze Cloud’s features is Reboot-to-Restore.
Reboot-to-Restore
This patented feature makes schools’ workstations virtually indestructible. In the section above, we mentioned how important it is for schools to be able to reset computers to a predetermined safe state. Reboot-to-Restore technology does just that. It can undo any unauthorized changes made to a system upon reboot, effectively eliminating unwanted modifications and malware.
To learn more about how Deep Freeze Cloud can help educational institutions, reach out to our experts today.