What do Vikings, Medieval Knights or Wonder Woman and Captain America have in common? They protect their people from evil and carry protective shields to thwart off vicious attacks.
While educators go about moulding the next generation of Kiwi kids into tomorrow’s leaders, there are those of us thinking about important but perhaps less understood technical threats schools face…for example how we protect schools from an evolving number of online threats.
Here at N4L, we keep track of industry trends and look for better ways to protect your students and staff from a wide range of online threats, it’s just one of the things we do, and what we’re here for!
Now for Wonder Woman and Captain America, a simple layer of lycra just won’t do when you’re warding off intergalactic bad guys. Sometimes you need something to give you peace of mind and extra protection for when you’re up against unfavourable odds, perhaps a shield!
From May 2018, N4L has been rolling out a new protective network shield – an additional layer of protection in the fight against evolving online threats.
The best thing is that it’s fully funded as part of the Managed Network and helps ward off online threats (malware, phishing and command & control sites). It also helps prevent students from bypassing a school’s web filtering policy by blocking more VPNs than before.
How it works
If you’re anything like me, you’re probably curious as to how this works. The answer to this lies in one of the foundations of the internet, the Domain Name System (DNS). When we browse websites we enter URLs such as https://www.n4l.co.nz, and the DNS works behind the scenes to translate the domain name into an IP address e.g 35.203.165.202 that our browser then connects to.
Now if we know that a particular domain name or IP address is being used for malicious purposes, we have the ability to ensure you don’t connect to these nefarious sites – simple.
Here’s a snapshot of the threats we’ve blocked in a 24-hour period using the new DNS threat protection service:
- 820,000+ attempted connections to sites known to be hosting malware or phishing scams
- 343,000+ attempted connections to bypass school filtering.
Is your school protected?
Already using N4L’s web filtering or another filtering service? No problem, you can have both! This is an additional layer of protection – a shield to your existing armour.
If you currently use our filtering, you don’t have to do a thing to enable this service as it’s all managed from our end. Most schools use our web filtering, and more than 80% are already up and running with the new DNS threat protection.
Not using N4L’s filtering? Then you may not be protected against the online threats described above. But don’t worry, you can still benefit from the additional layer of threat protection, we just need your permission via a call to our Helpdesk.
If you’d like to know more about the additional layer of threat protection, or want check whether your school is protected from the threats mentioned, give our team a call on 0800 LEARNING or find out more here.