Tag Archives: USA

Don’t Let the Cyber Grinch Ruin your Winter Break: Project Cybersafe Schools protects small school districts in the US

Post Syndicated from Zaid Zaid http://blog.cloudflare.com/author/zaid-zaid/ original https://blog.cloudflare.com/project-cybersafe-schools-update


As the last school bell rings before winter break, one thing school districts should keep in mind is that during the winter break, schools can become particularly vulnerable to cyberattacks as the reduced staff presence and extended downtime create an environment conducive to security lapses. Criminal actors make their move when organizations are most vulnerable: on weekends and holiday breaks. With fewer personnel on-site, routine monitoring and response to potential threats may be delayed, providing cybercriminals with a window of opportunity. Schools store sensitive student and staff data, including personally identifiable information, financial records, and confidential academic information, and therefore consequences of a successful cyberattack can be severe. It is imperative that educational institutions implement robust cybersecurity measures to safeguard their digital infrastructure.

If you are a small public school district in the United States, Project Cybersafe Schools is here to help. Don’t let the Cyber Grinch ruin your winter break.

The impact of Project Cybersafe Schools thus far

In August of this year, as part of the White House Back to School Safely: K-12 Cybersecurity Summit, Cloudflare announced Project Cybersafe Schools to help support eligible K-12 public school districts with a package of Zero Trust cybersecurity solutions — for free, and with no time limit.

The response from school districts across the United States exceeded our expectations. We have had inquiries from over 200 school districts in over 30 states and Guam. Over the past few months, we have onboarded dozens of qualifying school districts into the program. As a result, over 60,000 students, teachers, and staff are protected by Cloudflare’s cloud email security to protect against a broad spectrum of threats including Business Email Compromise, multichannel phishing, credential harvesting, and other targeted attacks. These school districts are also receiving protection against Internet threats with DNS filtering by preventing users from reaching unwanted or harmful online content like ransomware or phishing sites. There are more than 9,000 small public school districts across the United States with fewer than 2,500 students. All of those school districts are eligible for Project Cybersafe Schools (for free, and with no time limit — see below for all the details), and we want to help as many as possible.

Since we launched the program, the White House has continued to amplify awareness around the risks for schools as well as the opportunities school districts have to protect themselves. Cloudflare hosted a series of live onboarding sessions at the start of the program and also created a Cybersafe School Resource Hub for school districts to learn more about the program and submit an inquiry.

What our participants are saying about the program

Here’s what a few Project Cybersafe Schools have to say about the impact of the program on small school districts.

“Project Cybersafe Schools has been incredibly helpful, especially for school districts with smaller enrollments, to provide resources, tools and information that otherwise might be out of grasp. Often, these smaller districts have individuals with many responsibilities and cybersecurity may not always be at the forefront. The tools Cloudflare offers as part of the White House focus to strengthen Cybersecurity across the K-12 spectrum allow us greater visibility into the threats experienced through E-Mail as well as protect our devices by layering DNS-based filtering on top of our existing environment to protect against threats that may come through via ransomware or phishing sites. Being able to leverage multiple layers of security helps us be more robust in protecting our student and teacher devices and ensure our learning environment is successful, safe and productive in the current digital landscape.”  
– Randy Saeks, Network Manager, Glencoe School District 35, Glencoe, Illinois

“Quitman School District was excited to add another layer of security for our staff and students with Cloudflare Project Cybersafe Schools. Living in a low income, rural community, we were grateful for the opportunity to add a world-class free service to our school’s network architecture. Partnering with Cloudflare allowed us to continue to modernize and strengthen our security measures and protect our staff and students from a wide variety of threats. This implementation was quick and easy, and we were ecstatic that there was no expiration date for this service.  We were amazed to see that Cloudflare caught nearly 4,000 malicious emails in the first month of implementation!  We are confident that Cloudflare will continue to keep our district and infrastructure safe from harmful threats.”
– Matt Champion, Technology Coordinator, Quitman School District, Quitman, Mississippi

What Zero Trust services are available?

Eligible K-12 public school districts in the United States will have access to a package of enterprise-level Zero Trust cybersecurity services for free and with no time limit – there is no catch and no underlying obligations. Eligible organizations will benefit from:

  • Email Protection: Safeguards inboxes with cloud email security by protecting against a broad spectrum of threats including malware-less Business Email Compromise, multichannel phishing, credential harvesting, and other targeted attacks.
  • DNS Filtering: Protects against Internet threats with DNS filtering by preventing users from reaching unwanted or harmful online content like ransomware or phishing sites and can be deployed to comply with the Children’s Internet Protection Act (CIPA).

Who can apply?

To be eligible, Project Cybersafe Schools participants must be:

  • K-12 public school districts located in the United States
  • Up to 2,500 students in the district

If you think your school district may be eligible, we welcome you to contact us to learn more.  Please visit our Project Cybersafe Schools Resource Hub.

For schools or school districts that do not qualify for Project Cybersafe Schools, Cloudflare has other packages available with educational pricing. If you do not qualify for Project Cybersafe Schools, but are interested in our educational services, please contact us at [email protected].

Project Cybersafe Schools: Bringing security tools for free to small K-12 school districts in the US

Post Syndicated from Zaid Zaid original http://blog.cloudflare.com/project-cybersafe-schools/

Project Cybersafe Schools: Bringing security tools for free to small K-12 school districts in the US

Project Cybersafe Schools: Bringing security tools for free to small K-12 school districts in the US

Like other under-resourced organizations, schools face cyber attacks from malicious actors that can impact their ability to safely perform their basic function: teach children. Schools face email, phishing, and ransomware attacks that slow access and threaten leaks of confidential student data. And these attacks have real effects. In a report issued at the end of 2022, the U.S. Government Accountability Office concluded that schools serving kindergarten through 12th grade (K-12) reported significant educational impact and monetary loss due to cybersecurity incidents, such as ransomware attacks. Recovery time can extend from 2 all the way up to 9 months — that’s almost an entire school year.

Cloudflare’s mission is to help build a better Internet, and we have always believed in helping protect those who might otherwise not have the resources to protect themselves from cyberattack.

It is against this backdrop that we’re very excited to introduce an initiative aimed at small K-12 public school districts: Project Cybersafe Schools. Announced as part of the Back to School Safely: K-12 Cybersecurity Summit at the White House on August 8, 2023, Project Cybersafe Schools will support eligible K-12 public school districts with a package of Zero Trust cybersecurity solutions — for free, and with no time limit. These tools will help eligible school districts minimize their exposure to common cyber threats.

Schools are prime targets for cyberattacks

In Q2 2023 alone, Cloudflare blocked an average of 70 million cyber threats each day targeting the U.S. education sector, and saw a 47% increase in DDoS attacks quarter-over-quarter. In September 2022, the Los Angeles Unified School District suffered a cyber attack, and the perpetrators later posted students’ private information on the dark web. Then, in January 2022, the public school system in Albuquerque, New Mexico was forced to close down for two days following a cyber attack that compromised student data. The list goes on. Between 2016 and 2022, there were 1,619 publicly reported cybersecurity-related incidents aimed at K-12 public schools and districts in the United States.

As an alliance member of the Joint Cyber Defense Collaborative, Cloudflare began conversations with officials from the Cybersecurity & Infrastructure Security Agency (CISA), the Department of Education, and the White House about how we could partner to protect K-12 schools in the United States from cyber threats. We think that we are particularly well-suited to help protect K-12 schools against cyber attacks. For almost a decade, Cloudflare has supported organizations that are particularly vulnerable to cyber threats and lack the resources to protect themselves through projects like Project Galileo, the Athenian Project, the Critical Infrastructure Defense Project, and Project Safekeeping.

Unlike many colleges, universities, and even some larger school districts, smaller school districts often lack the capacity to manage cyber threats. The lack of funding and staff make schools prime targets for hackers. These attacks prevent students from learning, put students’ personal information at risk, and cost school districts time and money in the aftermath of the attacks.

Project Cybersafe Schools: protecting the smallest K-12 public school districts

Project Cybersafe Schools will help support small K-12 public school districts by providing cloud email security to protect against a broad spectrum of threats including Business Email Compromise, multichannel phishing, credential harvesting, and other targeted attacks. Project Cybersafe Schools will also protect against Internet threats with DNS filtering by preventing users from reaching unwanted or harmful online content like ransomware or phishing sites. It can also be deployed to comply with the Children’s Internet Protection Act (CIPA), which Congress passed in 2000, to address concerns about children’s access to obscene or harmful content on the Internet.

We believe that Cloudflare can make a meaningful impact on the cybersecurity needs of our small school districts, which allows the schools to focus on what they do best: teaching students. Hopefully, this project will bring privacy, security, and peace of mind to school managers, staff, teachers, and students, allowing them to focus solely on teaching and learning fearlessly.

What Zero Trust services are available?

Eligible K-12 public school districts in the United States will have access to a package of enterprise-level Zero Trust cybersecurity services for free and with no time limit – there is no catch and no underlying obligations. Eligible organizations will benefit from:

  • Email Protection: Safeguards inboxes with cloud email security by protecting against a broad spectrum of threats including malware-less Business Email Compromise, multichannel phishing, credential harvesting, and other targeted attacks.
  • DNS Filtering: Protects against Internet threats with DNS filtering by preventing users from reaching unwanted or harmful online content like ransomware or phishing sites and can be deployed to comply with the Children’s Internet Protection Act (CIPA).

Who can apply?

To be eligible, Project Cybersafe Schools participants must be:

  • K-12 public school districts located in the United States
  • Up to 2,500 students in the district

If you think your school district may be eligible, we welcome you to contact us to learn more. To apply please visit: https://www.cloudflare.com/lp/cybersafe-schools/

For schools or school districts that do not qualify for Project Cybersafe Schools, Cloudflare has other packages available with educational pricing. If you do not qualify for Project Cybersafe Schools, but are interested in our educational services, please contact us at [email protected].

Cloudflare achieves FedRAMP authorization to secure more of the public sector

Post Syndicated from Aron Nakazato original https://blog.cloudflare.com/cloudflare-achieves-fedramp-authorization/

Cloudflare achieves FedRAMP authorization to secure more of the public sector

This post is also available in Deutsch, Français and Español.

Cloudflare achieves FedRAMP authorization to secure more of the public sector

We are excited to announce our public sector suite of services, Cloudflare for Government, has achieved FedRAMP Moderate Authorization. The Federal Risk and Authorization Management Program (“FedRAMP”) is a US-government-wide program that provides a standardized approach to security assessment, authorization, and continuous monitoring for cloud products and services. FedRAMP Moderate Authorization demonstrates Cloudflare’s continued commitment to customer trust, and Cloudflare for Government’s ability to secure and protect US public sector organizations.

Key differentiators

We believe public sector customers deserve the same experience as any other customer — so rather than building a separate platform, we leveraged our existing platform for Cloudflare for Government. Cloudflare’s platform protects and accelerates any Internet application without adding hardware, installing software, or changing a line of code. It’s also one of the largest and fastest global networks on the planet.

One of the things that distinguishes Cloudflare for Government from other FedRAMP cloud providers is the number of data centers we have in scope, with each able to run our full stack of FedRAMP Authorized services locally, with a single control plane on our private backbone. Networking and security services can only improve the user experience if they are run as close to the user as possible, even if the user doesn’t live on an east or west coast hub. While other cloud service providers may only have a handful of data centers within their FedRAMP environment, Cloudflare for Government includes over 30 of our US-based data centers. This provides Cloudflare for Government customers with the same speed, availability, and security that non-highly regulated customers have come to expect from us.

Cloudflare for Government services

Cloudflare for Government is a suite of services for U.S. government and public sector agencies, delivered from our global, highly resilient cloud network with built-in security and performance.

Cloudflare achieves FedRAMP authorization to secure more of the public sector

Application services

Web Application Firewall with API protection provides an intelligent, integrated and scalable solution to protect your critical web applications. Rate Limiting protects against denial of service attacks, brute force login attempts, and other abusive behavior that targets the application layer. Load Balancing improves application performance and availability by steering traffic from unhealthy origin servers and dynamically distributing it to the most available and responsive server pools.

Bot Management manages good and bad bots in real-time, helps prevent credential stuffing, content scraping, content spam, inventory hoarding, credit card stuffing, and application DDoS. CDN provides ultra-fast static and dynamic content delivery over our global network; it offers users the ability to exercise precise control over how content is cached, helps reduce bandwidth costs and take advantage of built-in unmetered DDoS protections. Enterprise grade DNS offers the fastest response time, unparalleled redundancy, and advanced security with built-in DDoS mitigation and DNSSEC.

Zero trust

Zero Trust Network Access creates secure boundaries for applications by allowing access to resources after verifying identity, context, and policy adherence for each specific request. Remote Browser Isolation provides a fast and reliable solution for remote browsing by running all browser code in the cloud. Secure Web Gateway protects users and data by inspecting user traffic, filtering and blocking malicious content, and identifying compromised devices.

Network services

Cloudflare for Government can replace your legacy WAN architecture with Cloudflare’s WAN-as-a-Service which provides expansive connectivity, cloud-based security, performance and control. L3/4 DDoS can protect your websites, applications, and network — Cloudflare blocks an average of 87 billion threats per day! Network Interconnect enables you to directly connect your on-premise networks and cloud hosted environments to Cloudflare for Government.

Developer platform

Workers provides a serverless execution environment that allows you to create entirely new applications or augment existing ones without configuring or maintaining infrastructure. Workers KV is a global, low-latency, key-value data store. It supports exceptionally high read volumes with low-latency, making it possible to build highly dynamic APIs and websites which respond as quickly as a cached static file would. Durable Objects provides low-latency coordination and consistent storage for the Workers platform through two features: global uniqueness and a transactional storage API.

What’s next for Cloudflare for Government

Our achievement of FedRAMP Moderate for our Cloudflare for Government suite of products is the first step in our journey to help secure government entities. As you may have read earlier this week, our focus hasn’t been only with the US public sector. Our Zero Trust products are being leveraged to protect critical infrastructure in Japan, Australia, Germany, Portugal, and the UK. We’re also securing organizations qualified under Project Galileo and Athenian with our Cloudflare One Zero Trust suite at no cost.  We will expand the Cloudflare for Government suite to allow governments all over the world to have the opportunity to use our services to protect their assets and users.

We aim to help agencies build stronger cybersecurity, without compromising the customer experience of the government services that all US citizens rely on. We invite all our Cloudflare for Government public and private partners to learn more about our capabilities and work with us to develop solutions to the rapidly evolving security demands required in complex environments. Please reach out to us at [email protected] with any questions.

For more information on Cloudflare’s FedRAMP status, please visit the FedRAMP Marketplace.

The US government is working on an “Internet for all” plan. We’re on board.

Post Syndicated from Mike Conlow original https://blog.cloudflare.com/internet-for-all-us/

The US government is working on an “Internet for all” plan. We’re on board.

The US government is working on an “Internet for all” plan. We’re on board.

Recently, the United States Department of Commerce announced that all 50 states and every eligible territory had signed on to the “Internet for All” initiative. Internet for All is the US government’s $65 billion initiative to close the Digital Divide once and for all through new broadband deployment and digital equity programs. Cloudflare is on a mission to help build a better Internet, and we support initiatives like this because we want more people using the Internet on high-throughput, low-latency, resilient and affordable Internet connections. It’s been written often since the start of the pandemic because it’s true: it isn’t acceptable that students need to go to a Taco Bell parking lot to do their homework, and a good Internet connection is increasingly important for doing adult jobs as well.

The Internet for All initiative is the result of $65 billion in broadband-related funding appropriated by the US Congress as part of the Infrastructure Investment and Jobs Act (IIJA). It’s been called a “once in a generation” funding opportunity, and compared with the Rural Electrification Act which brought power lines to rural America in the 1930s. The components of the broadband portion of the Infrastructure bill are:

  • \$42.5 billion for broadband deployment – new wires and wireless radios in places that don’t have them – called the Broadband Equity, Access, and Deployment Program (BEAD).
  • \$14.2 billion to make permanent a $30 per month subsidy for low-income families to purchase a home Internet subscription.
  • \$2.75 billion to establish a grant program that will improve digital equity, which means teaching Americans how to make the most of the Internet and their home connection.
  • \$2 billion for new connectivity on tribal lands.
  • \$1 billion to establish new “middle-mile” capacity, which will connect rural communities to the Internet “backbone”.

The US should be applauded for making this kind of investment in broadband infrastructure. By appropriating federal funds, the government is able to ensure the money is used as it’s intended. For example, federal rules will require that areas with no infrastructure and disadvantaged urban areas will receive priority funding. Individual states will have the option of adding their own rules.

There’s significant work to do. According to the latest numbers from the Federal Communications Commission, 12% of Americans lack access to home broadband with throughput of at least 100 Mbps download and 20 Mbps upload.

There’s another way to think about access to broadband. A wire running near your house doesn’t do any good if the residents can’t afford it, or don’t know how to use the Internet. According to Pew Research, 23% of Americans say they don’t have an Internet connection at home. Those aren’t just rural areas without broadband infrastructure, it’s also urban areas where the connection is too expensive.

Cloudflare isn’t a disinterested observer. When Internet users don’t have access to good broadband, their experience with our services – the websites, APIs and security products we offer – won’t work as well as they should. In the map below, we use the Resource Timing API to measure the latency between Internet users and the major Content Delivery Networks (CDNs), including Cloudflare. We see rural and southern states have worse performance than the northeastern United States, with Hawaii and Alaska being off the charts in terms of their poor speed.

50th percentile TCP Connect Time (ms) to Major Content Delivery Networks

The US government is working on an “Internet for all” plan. We’re on board.
*Alaska and Hawaii have TCP Connect times of 263 and 160 respectively. 

Access technology, which is how Internet users connect to the Internet (cable, fiber, DSL, wireless, satellite), is one important part of the overall quality of their connection, but there are other, less talked about factors. Another factor is how close geographically the user is to the content and services they are accessing. Midwestern states where requests for data need to travel to Internet hubs in Chicago or Dallas are going to be slower than requests for data from Washington, DC, served by the giant Internet hub around Ashburn, Virginia. To be as close as possible to users geographically, Cloudflare has servers in 51 locations across 28 states in the US, and is still growing.

Programs that provide funding for deployment are one piece of the puzzle, but there are important non-financial initiatives as well. For example, the IIJA directed the Federal Communications Commission to come up with “broadband nutrition labels” that will be shown to consumers at the point of purchase for any Internet service. Just a few weeks ago, the FCC announced their implementation. Cloudflare filed comments with the FCC with our suggestions for how to make these labels informative, future-proof, and easy for consumers to understand. We also wrote about it here.

The US government is working on an “Internet for all” plan. We’re on board.

We’d be remiss to not also mention our own contribution to digital divide initiatives – Project Pangea. For community and non-profit networks that have invested in last-mile infrastructure but need a connection to the Internet – “transit” in industry terms – the network can connect to Cloudflare, and we’ll provide that Internet transit at no charge to the network. It’s one piece of the puzzle, and we’re always looking for additional ways to help.

One thing everyone can do is help the FCC build the most accurate broadband map possible by going to the map, entering your address, and verifying the data. The map will show your individual location and all ISPs that claim to serve your address. If there’s a problem – and there can be, it’s a new map and new process – you can file a challenge right from the FCC’s mapping site.

It’s laudable that the US government is stepping up with billions of dollars in funding for broadband networks and digital equity programs. In the shared project of helping build a better Internet, this is an important and big step.