The 18th edition of Safer Internet Day (SID) will be celebrated on February 9, 2021. This year’s theme is once again “Together for a better internet,” with the goal to make the internet a safer place for children and young people. Started in Europe as a movement to improve internet safety for everyone, SID is now celebrated in 170 countries, and its rallying cry is more relevant today than ever before.
The pandemic has increased students’ and educators’ internet dependency, and with it the growing need for safer online practices. Almost overnight, schools and universities were forced to shift to online modes of learning, exponentially increasing the number of students accessing networks and educational platforms remotely—all of whom needed to be secured. The adoption of remote learning methods spurred a rise in online child abuse. This changing dynamic, which puts young students at an increased risk for abuse, calls for proactive measures to protect children as they spend more time online.
Securing Educational Institutions with BloxOne®️ Threat Defense
Throughout the pandemic, educational organizations have turned to Infoblox to secure staff and students from phishing traps and other online predatory attacks.
- Using the Infoblox BloxOne®️ Threat Defense hybrid solution, American University of Cairo (AUC) automatically secures every connection across their network, protecting their remote students and workforce wherever they are. The university is leveraging key security features such as ecosystem integrations and threat detection for lookalike domains to block unintended access to these malicious domains.
- Morgan County School District in Utah is securing its five schools with category based filtering , which is essential to any IT strategy in the education sector. It protects students, faculty and staff from accessing inappropriate or harmful content categories online, which is especially important in a virtual school environment because it protects children from cyber-bullying, pornography, gambling websites, and other bad actors.
- The Queen’s University Belfast is a world-renowned public research university in Northern Ireland which leverages BloxOne Threat Defense to mitigate threats using DNS,protecting its learning platform from advanced malware exploits such as phishing and data exfiltration. As the university invests heavily into developing a learning platform for its student-faculty network that spreads across 80 countries, providing secured access to all users remains one of its top priorities.
By using BloxOne®️ Threat Defense from Infoblox, these institutions are extending enterprise-level security to home and remote learning environments. BloxOne Threat Defense provides a foundational layer of security that:
- Detects and blocks phishing, exploits, ransomware, and other modern malware, preventing teleworkers and remote learners from accessing malicious web destinations using DNS as the first line of defense,
- Blocks access to objectionable content restricted by policy,
- Uses unique patented technology to prevent DNS based data exfiltration and keep protected data safe.
- Monitors for advanced threats including the rising threat of lookalike domains.
Safer Internet Day opens a dialogue between communities and organizations to actively address security concerns through the exchange of ideas, technical solutions, and best practices. This Safer Internet Day, Infoblox remains committed to helping parents and caregivers understand the threats children face online and the tools and best practices that can keep them safe as they achieve their educational goals.