Podcast Series: Innovations in Education

Explore the full series of eSchool News podcasts hosted by Kevin Hogan—created to keep you on the cutting edge of innovations in education.

What happens when student hackers shut down a district’s internet?

Denial of service attacks can shut down internet access and leave IT teams powerless

When Jeff McCune noticed that his district’s 500 Mbps internet connection was full, he knew something was amiss. When he investigated further and saw that the Internet protocol (IP) addresses were coming in from China, Australia, and the Netherlands, McCune realized that the problem was more than just a random overload or ISP outage.

“I was seeing 550 Mbps of traffic coming from a single link and that pushed our usage up over the 10 percent cushion” allowed by its main service provider, said McCune, a network analyst with St. Charles Community Unit School District (CUSD) 303 in St. Charles, Ill. “There was no way anyone from China would surf the website of a school district in Midwestern America that hard.”

To McCune, it appeared the CUSD was being hit by a full-blown Distributed Denial of Service (DDoS) attack. The hackers cut off the entire district’s internet access for four hours at a time and then repeated the process 10 more times over the following six weeks during the fall of 2014.…Read More

Colleges join internet goliaths in long-awaited protocol change

Colleges are expected to use IPv4 for another decade.

June 6 was perhaps the most important day in the history of the commercial internet, and hardly anyone noticed.

Google, Facebook, Yahoo!, and a host of the web’s most visited sites made the switch to the Internet Protocol Version 6 that day—known as World IPv6 Day—marking a momentous shift from the old protocol, IPv4, after it ran out of web addresses last year.

Colleges and universities have followed suit as well, turning to IPv6 after years of preparation on the part of campus technology leaders and their IT staffers, and so far, everything has gone smoothly.…Read More

Mobile device boom sparks U.S. web address shortage

A telecommunications official on Sept. 28 warned that the United States could run out of unique internet addresses to assign to new devices by the end of next year, Reuters reports. Internet Protocol version 4, known as IPv4, provides the dominant architecture for the internet. It requires devices to have unique identifiers, known as an IP address, but it only has space for 4.3 billion of those addresses. The recent profusion of mobile devices like Research in Motion’s BlackBerry and Apple’s iPad, and the expansion of internet services to more homes, have quickly depleted available addresses. An upgrade to the internet’s main communications protocol with more space, called IPv6, is available—but adoption in the United States has lagged behind Europe, China, and other countries. “We now face an exhaustion of IPv4 addresses,” Lawrence Strickling, administrator of the U.S. National Telecommunications and Information Administration, said at a meeting of government and industry stakeholders. “Fortunately, IPv6 will support 340 trillion trillion trillion addresses,” Strickling said, and he urged organizations to deploy and integrate IPv6 widely. But the transition might not be easy. It could cost enterprises a lot of money, and the new technology might not work well with the technology they use now…

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