Situation
Commission Scolaire de Rouyn-Noranda delivers education to 5,000 – 6,000 students across the Rouyn-Noranda region of Quebec. The IT department supports two secondary schools, fifteen primary schools, a poly-vocational center and a center for adult learning. IT functions are run from a centralized administration office. At any given time the team is deploying several projects all of which must either consider or are cybersecurity investments.
Problem
The school board has been able to avoid any serious cyber breaches to date, but have noticed a big increase in phishing attempts targeting the administration. Email is the one vector that the IT team does not feel they have 100% control over because they can’t control what a user clicks on. This is especially acute for teams that receive a lot of attachments as part of normal business, like the finance department. To help protect against this they had already taken steps to bolster their anti-spam systems and were looking for additional cost-effective perimeter security.
Solution
D-Zone was completely seamless to implement. As a busy team being able to implement CIRA’s D-Zone DNS firewall as a layer of protection required only a few minutes of set-up for each network being secured. The architecture also makes it easier to provide added security to remote sites and to any segregated networks, like the public wifi networks.
Result
At the time of this success story, five networks have been added to the service. Being able to see a roll-up of all networks allows a simple view of the threat landscape due to DNS lookups helps to monitor for spikes in risky traffic. They have also applied content filtering across the networks to ensure age-appropriate access to web content. Using custom URL filtering rules they can instantly add new spear phishing threats, that may not be picked up in global threat analysis. A thirty day snapshot reveals 71 blocked attempt to visit sites containing malware or phishing and hundreds to inappropriate content. What made D-Zone DNS Firewall such an easy decision was the great value it provides to Quebec schools when compared to the alternatives.
