As teachers begin preparing classrooms and parents start shopping for supplies, opportunistic threat actors conceive plans. While students start getting ready to go back to school, so do attackers. In 2024, Vercara’s UltraDDoS platform detected a distinct month-over-month difference between Distributed Denial of Service (DDoS) attacks targeting the education sector:
- July 2024: 0.25% of DDoS attacks targeted the Education sector.
- August 2024: 1.62% of DDoS attacks targeted the Education sector.
While the percentage of overall DDoS attacks targeting the Education sector seems small, these statistics indicate a 548% month-over-month increase.
Looking at the July 2025 DDoS Analysis, attackers are heavily targeting the education vertical this year. Making its first appearance in the Top Three Most Targeted Industries category, 8.83% of malicious traffic was linked to Education.
However, IT and security teams across the K-12 and higher education sectors have some good news from the August 2025 DNS Analysis report. Vercara’s UltraDDoS platform confirmed that the vertical is working harder than ever to improve its DDoS mitigation strategies, noting the following:
- 3% of organizations in the Education vertical had No Error success rates, indicating they maintain very high resolution success rates.
- 7% of organizations in the Education vertical had very low NXDOMAIN rates, indicating that they have cleaner DNS configurations.
Both of these statistics indicate that the sector is preparing itself to protect against DDoS attacks more vigorously. For example, a sustained high No Error rate can help organizations defend against high volumes of queries. Meanwhile, having cleaner DNS configurations means that organizations can more accurately identify high spikes in the NXDOMAIN rates that may indicate a potential attack in progress.
As all schools get ready to welcome students back through their doors, IT and security teams should work to bolster their DNS and protect their data from opportunistic attackers.
Why Do Cybercriminals Target the Education Vertical?
Across K-12 and higher education, schools are profitable threat actor targets. Their systems contain valuable personally identifiable information (PII), especially when looking through the lens of dark web operations. For many cybercriminals, children’s data is lucrative for perpetrating identity theft and fraud. Young children rarely have bank accounts that would trigger an identity theft notification, giving cybercriminals several years of data use. Meanwhile, institutions of higher education often store and transmit valuable research, making them targets for more sophisticated attackers.
However, beyond the data’s value, malicious actors target the vertical because it continues to struggle with challenges like:
- Tight budgets: School districts and institutions of higher education often face budget constraints that make hiring enough staff and investing in security technologies difficult.
- Expanded attack surface: As teachers, staff, and students often bring personal devices into the classroom, IT and security teams struggle to manage risky behaviors like clicking on malicious links or downloading malicious apps.
- Inexperienced users: Despite providing faculty, students, and staff with cyberawareness training, many schools have users susceptible to phishing attacks, especially in elementary schools where children use Chromebooks regularly.
- Third-party integrations: Schools increasingly integrate various applications that enable teaching and communications, like Turnitin to detect plagiarism or Blackboard for managing grades and assignments.
What Are Some Common DNS-Based Attacks In The Education Sector?
In a Distributed Denial of Service (DDoS) attack, malicious actors send high volumes of requests to the school’s servers, overwhelming it and leaving it unable to respond. These attacks disrupt service, leaving faculty, staff, and students unable to connect to critical educational resources. Not every DDoS attack targets the organization’s DNS. However, the following five attack types can be mitigated by implementing robust DNS configurations and protections:
- NXDOMAIN Attack: Generating high volumes of queries for non-existent domains that can exhaust the DNS server’s resources, leaving it unable to fulfill legitimate requests.
- DNS Amplification: Sending high volumes of DNS name lookup requests to an open DNS server so it sends a spoofed or malicious response.
- DNS Tunneling: Stealing sensitive data or establishing command and control (C2) channels by sending malicious payloads in DNS queries and responses.
- DNS Hijacking: Redirecting legitimate queries to malicious IP addresses by changing DNS records or resolver settings.
- Cache Poisoning: Inserting false DNS data into a resolver’s cache to redirect users to attacker-controlled sites.
Best Practices for Mitigating DNS-Based Attacks
While students are picking out back-to-school clothes and buying new backpacks, IT and security teams can prepare for the new academic year by studying and testing themselves on some DNS best practices.
Enable and Validate DNSSEC
DNSSEC validates the response that users get when they send requests to your site, mitigating the risk that attackers can inject fake records into the DNS resolution processes. It protects users from being redirected to malicious sites, adding a layer of protection against phishing and credential theft.
Monitor NXDOMAIN and No Error Trends
Sudden NXDOMAIN spikes can signal a random subdomain flood, while unexpected No Error surges may point to a DNS amplification attack. By setting up automated monitoring to detect abnormal activities, you can block or filter the malicious traffic before it disrupts services.
Harden Resolvers and Authoritative Servers
Just like you need to harden teacher workstations and student Chromebooks, you need to configure your DNS infrastructure to mitigate risks. By hardening your DNS services, you reduce attackers’ ability to gather reconnaissance about your environment or abuse DNS services as part of an attack. You should consider:
- Disabling recursion on authoritative servers.
- Limiting zone transfers to specific IPs.
- Configuring resolvers to accept queries only from approved networks.
Rate-limit Suspicious Query Patterns
Rate-limiting protects against attackers trying to exhaust DNS processing capacity, like during an NXDOMAIN flood. Implementing query-per-second (QPS) thresholds and using filters to block high-volume requests for non-existent domains or queries to the same record mitigate DDoS risks.
Continuously Monitor DNS Traffic
By integrating DNS traffic monitoring into your overarching security monitoring, you can set alerts for attack signatures. Some patterns to monitor include:
- Repeating queries for uncommon domains.
- High volumes of queries from a single source.
- Abnormal response type distributions.
UltraDNS: Easy-to-Implement, Reliable DNS Services for Schools and Institutions of Higher Education
UltraDNS is a cloud-based service that includes authoritative and recursive DNS servers so schools and institutions of higher education can seamlessly and securely manage their digital infrastructures. With near-zero response times, UltraDNS handles up to 100 billion global authoritative DNS queries daily, ensuring optimal speed and reliability to ensure that faculty, staff, and students have continuous access to educational and administrative resources. Our built-in layered security protects against online internet threats, so customers can implement nameserver segmentation and DNSSEC to mitigate attack risks.
To supplement your staff, we have 24x7x365 support from a team of dedicated DNS experts who can help answer your questions and maintain your DNS footprint’s health and security.
