KELA Group’s Defense Technology Successfully Shields Large U.S. School District from Cybersecurity Attack

K-12 school districts are appealing targets: a large attack surface, limited IT and security resources, and an expectation that they may pay. In the 2022-2023 academic year eight prominent US districts suffered major cyberattacks that closed schools and cost more than $1 million.

For this southeastern US district, KELA Group’s cyber intelligence platform continuously discovered its true attack surface, identified infected machines tied to school subdomains, and monitored the cybercrime underground for school assets. When compromised accounts that would have opened the district’s internal systems appeared for sale, the district purchased the bot files with KELA’s Cyber Intelligence Center and removed them from the underground.

Key results:

• Compromised accounts for sale detected automatically before an attacker could use them
• Bot files acquired and removed from the cybercrime underground with KELA’s Cyber Intelligence Center
• A large-scale data leak and a potential ransomware attack prevented
• Continuous discovery of the district’s attack surface, including unknown vulnerabilities beyond CVEs
• Managed triage and threat hunting that focused limited staff time on the most critical threats