It used to be that school-day interruptions were caused by simple things: bad weather, fire drills, the occasional playground fist fight. But as the nation's schools get connected to the Internet, a veritable Pandora's box of viruses, bugs, and security holes has opened and things are no longer as simple as they were.
Just ask Advanced Technologies Academy in Nevada, which had its computer system attacked last week, bringing the school to its knees for the better part of an afternoon.
On Friday, an Internet attacker used a well-known exploit called a "teardrop" attack to choke off the school's network connection. Teardrop is a denial-of-service attack that freezes the targeted system by fooling it into performing operations that drain its resources. While these kind of attacks generally don't cause systems to be compromised, unsaved data is often lost.
"We have had an interruption where someone sent packets in, and basically at that point in time we disconnect the Internet line until that person decides to go elsewhere," said Debbie Crooks, system administrator for the school's network. "But we're going to be putting up some firewalls and proxy servers in the near future, so we won't have that problem anymore."
The Academy is a public high school in Nevada that specializes in computer and technology coursework. Its 750 computers -� 60 percent are Windows-based, 40 percent run the MacOS -- are all connected to the Internet.
"We've been very fortunate here -- we haven't had that many problems with security as far as the Internet goes," said Crooks.
Because most schools have only recently gone online, traditional computer-security organizations lack data on security breaches in that area. CERT, the Computer Emergency Response Team at Carnegie-Mellon University, compiles statistics on Internet attacks, but a CERT spokesman said that they can't isolate data for K-12 schools, or even the educational field in general.
Other groups, however, are filling the gap, helping schools get connected and making them aware of the hazards on the Net.
"Certainly over the past few years we've had to tighten our security," said Yvonne Andres, president of the Global SchoolNet Foundation, a San Diego-based nonprofit focusing on telecommunications in education. "The whole reason GSN even began was to provide a safe environment to use the Internet for educational purposes."
Andres said that schools definitely have to keep up with the safeguards, but she compared computer attacks to any other kind of vandalism. Just like a broken window is no reason to board up windows in a classroom, a crashed network is no reason to keep technology out of schools.
"I see more and more schools having to install firewalls where they never did before, where they have to keep their administrative servers and main servers completely unapproachable from [the Net]," she said. "The more of these safeguards that they put in, the more complicated it gets. Are they having to hire security experts? The answer is yes."
Bill Schmid, a board member of the Consortium for School Networking and executive director of the Florida Information Resource Network, said that attacks do happen, but shouldn't be a cause for alarm.
"It bugs us every now and then when someone will come in and hack," Schmid said. "As a matter of fact, we had a hacker hit one of our machines a couple of weeks ago -- but I'm not seeing a growth of activity."
When the Academy gets attacked via the Internet, Crooks said she simply pulls the T1 connection to the Internet and waits for the attacker to stop sending the rogue packets. She said that this can take anywhere from 30 minutes to a few hours.
"As soon as the attacks stop, then we're back online again," Crooks said.
While attacks can disrupt classwork -- especially if a teacher has planned an Internet project -- the school still hasn't lost any data, she said.
Schmid said that large districts have the resources to secure their networks, while smaller districts can call upon organizations such as his for assistance.
"What a lot of the network administrators are doing is basically tightening up the holes on their network from happening," he said. "We operate a statewide network here, and I haven't heard from our school districts that this has become a major problem for them. Not to say that it won't in the future."
