Less than two years ago, Clark County School District was besieged, experiencing daily cyberattacks on an improperly protected network. The existing firewall vendor was unable to handle the problems, and chaos reigned as classes were disrupted for hours at a time.

“We were undergoing about daily one-hour, two-hour [distributed denial of service] attacks, fragmented [user datagram protocol] attacks,” said Troy Miller (pictured), director of technology at Clark County School District in Las Vegas. “We were basically firewalling our firewall with our edge router.”

Miller spoke with Lisa Martin (@LuccaZara) and Peter Burris (@plburris), co-hosts of theCUBE, SiliconANGLE Media’s mobile livestreaming studio, at the Fortinet Accelerate event in Las Vegas, Nevada, as they discussed cybersecurity challenges facing modern school districts. (* Disclosure below.)

Connectivity is critical for education

Clark County is a Google school district with an internet-reliant curriculum. As director of technology, Miller is responsible for providing fast, reliable and secure service to an area the size of Rhode Island, with 320,000 students and 41,000 staff all active on multiple devices.

Knowing he had to do something to secure his network, Miller turned to Fortinet Inc. for help. Fortinet sent two FortiGate chassis-based, next-generation firewalls for the district to test, and the protection worked. “[They] made it a very seamless move, because they had the expertise that we didn’t at the time.” Miller said. He is confident that he made the right decision, not just to stop the cyberattacks that were disrupting the education of Clark County’s students, but for the long-term security requirements of the school district.

Although constrained by budget, Miller and his team are improving security by incrementally adding to the fabric that is already in place. Currently, they are pinpointing issues using logs, but assigning this to artificial intelligence would allow them to focus on more serious tasks, he stated.

Educating Clark County School District staff and students in security-aware online practices is also on Miller’s to-do list, with the goal of holding them accountable for their behavior. This is a challenge that Miller compares to climbing Everest: “I don’t know which is worse, the teachers or the students. I’m guessing the teachers. They’ll click on anything they see,” he concluded.

Watch the complete video interview below, and be sure to check out more of SiliconANGLE’s and theCUBE’s coverage of Fortinet Accelerate 2018. (* Disclosure: Fortinet Inc. sponsored this segment of theCUBE. Neither Fortinet nor other sponsors have editorial control over content on theCUBE or SiliconANGLE.)

Photo: SiliconANGLE