Case Study
Education: Metropolitan K-12 School District
A metropolitan K-12 public school district — 9,000 students and 4,000 computers stretched across 13 campuses — used a 60-day trial of the CC/B1 CyberSafety Platform™ to shift its security posture from reactive to proactive.
Challenge
Schools hold a wealth of personal data and rarely have funding for dedicated cybersecurity staff, which is why cyber attacks are among the most serious threats facing K-12 and higher-education institutions. Publicly tracked K-12 security incidents — including breaches tied to identity theft and payment fraud — rose sharply through 2020, and districts everywhere felt the pressure.
For this district, the situation felt especially precarious. With thousands of devices spread across 13 campuses, the IT team was fighting unreliable network connections, inadequate spam filtering, and unsecured video systems — reacting to problems rather than getting ahead of them. It seemed as if they would never get their arms around the network security problem.
Approach
The district installed the CC/B1 CyberSafety Platform™ for a 60-day complimentary trial, running alongside its existing infrastructure. The platform applies layered, automated inspection to district traffic:
- Signature-based intrusion detection with automatic IP blocking
- Antivirus and spam filtering for the district’s messaging systems
- Web content filtering
- Statistical risk scoring of network events, with every event logged for review
Outcome
The trial delivered immediate, measurable results: the platform stopped large volumes of viruses, identified and filtered a heavy stream of spam, and blocked a sustained volume of network attacks across the district’s campuses — with email protection that the IT team found highly effective.
The district’s IT team cited effectiveness, flexibility, and price as the deciding factors: nothing else they evaluated came close. After the trial, the district rolled the platform out enterprise-wide to protect its messaging systems, peer-to-peer connections, video infrastructure, and network infrastructure across all of its locations.