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Step 1: CLOUD BASED! My wife's school is on a 2-week remote learning due to COVID flair ups. Yesterday afternoon, while teachers were at the building, 3 youth

Step 1: CLOUD BASED! My wife's school is on a 2-week remote learning due to COVID flair ups. Yesterday afternoon, while teachers were at the building, 3 youth (caught on camera thankfully) went to my wife's school and physically cut the internet cabling going into the building, it was unable to be repaired by today. The servers hosting their various learning software are inside the building(s) at the middle and high school, today they had to use a waiver and completely cancel school since teachers can't actually assign work and the like. facepalm

teddyh 6y ago
The cloud will not help you. If your threat model include adversaries willing to perpetrate a physical DoS attack on your infrastructure, you need physical security. I.e. if the students had no internet cables to cut, they could just as easily have cut the power. Or set fire to the building. If you have physical assets threatened by physical attacks, you need physical security.
- ryanmercer 6y ago
  >The cloud will not help you. If the software was installed on a remote server, the children would have had no way of knowing how to gain access to it to cut the internet to an entire data center. Instead they simply looked at the side of the school building. So, you're mistaken at best? > I.e. if the students had no internet cables to cut, they could just as easily have cut the power. Or set fire to the building. So they're going to drive to the home of every teacher and cut their power or set their homes on fire? If the software was on a server not hosted at the actual school building, my wife could have been teaching today. From home. Most people do have the internet at home you know, however their only software that isn't hosted inside the school building is zoom. If they have a snow day because the buses can't safely get student to school, they could remote work at home, even if the power went out at the school building as it's highly unlikely every teacher would be affected by a limited power outage. Etc. >you need physical security. They do have physical security, but unless you're planning on automated defense turrets laying waste to children that get too close to an exterior wall, or enough humans to constantly monitor every last inch of the property via live camera feeds... Again, hosting all of the software in the cloud, instead of on a server inside the school building, is a far cheaper solution. A company providing this sort of hosted software is in a far better position to provide physical security, DDoS protection, etc if they're hosting the software for many schools instead of expecting thousands of schools to be able to do this on their own on a fairly limited budget.,

teddyh 6y ago

The cloud will not help you. If your threat model include adversaries willing to perpetrate a physical DoS attack on your infrastructure, you need physical security. I.e. if the students had no internet cables to cut, they could just as easily have cut the power. Or set fire to the building. If you have physical assets threatened by physical attacks, you need physical security.

ryanmercer 6y ago
>The cloud will not help you. If the software was installed on a remote server, the children would have had no way of knowing how to gain access to it to cut the internet to an entire data center. Instead they simply looked at the side of the school building. So, you're mistaken at best? > I.e. if the students had no internet cables to cut, they could just as easily have cut the power. Or set fire to the building. So they're going to drive to the home of every teacher and cut their power or set their homes on fire? If the software was on a server not hosted at the actual school building, my wife could have been teaching today. From home. Most people do have the internet at home you know, however their only software that isn't hosted inside the school building is zoom. If they have a snow day because the buses can't safely get student to school, they could remote work at home, even if the power went out at the school building as it's highly unlikely every teacher would be affected by a limited power outage. Etc. >you need physical security. They do have physical security, but unless you're planning on automated defense turrets laying waste to children that get too close to an exterior wall, or enough humans to constantly monitor every last inch of the property via live camera feeds... Again, hosting all of the software in the cloud, instead of on a server inside the school building, is a far cheaper solution. A company providing this sort of hosted software is in a far better position to provide physical security, DDoS protection, etc if they're hosting the software for many schools instead of expecting thousands of schools to be able to do this on their own on a fairly limited budget.,