DDoS Attack on Infinite Campus Limits Parent Access

DDoS Attack on Infinite Campus Limits Parent Access: A distributed denial-of-service (DDoS) attack on Infinite Campus, and educational software provider that hosts the parent portal for Oklahoma City Public Schools, created a lot of troubles for parents to get connected with district’s student information system.

While this is not the very first attack on Infinite Campus, district spokeswoman Beth Harrison told NewsOK that the recent attack was very far greater than any that had earlier even experienced in both volume and the duration. “The latest series of attacks began Monday, September 17, and included multiple customers and data centers. Homeland Security is now involved and Infinite Campus has hired additional security experts to assure all data is safe and to track down the attack perpetrators.”

In an announcement that was released to parents explained the cause of the access troubles, the Oklahoma City Public Schools wrote, “Please note that NO student data was stolen or breached. This attacks has just created to slow down or unresponsive the services. Many of the districts across the country are impacted and authorities are investigating. We will provide updates as soon as we have them. Thanks for your patience!”

This attack occurred at the start of the new school year, while the main motive behind these attacks is not yet clear.

According to the recent research from Corero Network Security, during the first half of 2018 DDoS attacks increased 40% from Q2 2017 to Q2 2018. “This highlights the increasing need for organizations that rely on high levels of online availability to ensure they include the latest always-on, real-time, automatic DDoS protection in their defense,” said Sean Newman, director product management, Corero Network Security.

“The key point is that such a critical service is able to be taken down by what is now a relatively cheap-and-simple-to-launch attack vector. It’s good to see that a strong emphasis is being placed on the privacy of any data being held, but that doesn’t help with the disruption and inconvenience caused when such a vital service is down for an extended period of time.”

Many of the online services that are provided by their parties such as Infinite Campus, and when such a providers faces attacks of DDoS or other types of types, their customers feel the impact. “The attack on Oklahoma City’s student information system is just another example of just how many services, which are increasingly provided online for reasons of cost, efficiency and scalability, are delivered without adequate resiliency to distributed denial-of-service attacks,” said Newman.