N4L sees spike in school cyber threats post-lockdown

Schools facing online threat rise

Network for Learning's first data and insights report shows schools faced more than 2,000 online threats a minute when they resumed teaching after last year's nationwide lockdown.

The report covers online safety between April and July 2020. It includes 22 days of remote learning when students were away from N4L's managed network. During this time N4L blocked more than 120 million individual threats.

N4L saw a spike in distributed denial of service attacks in the week of May 24, when students had returned to school.

Online crime surging

Schools were not alone, all forms of online crime surged as the pandemic sent students and workers home. There were more threats and the severity of threats increased. Many were designed to prey on people's anxieties triggered by Covid. The criminals also saw opportunity with people using less secure home networks.

Phishing scams, malware and unauthorised attempts to access the school network remain the most common cyber security threats.

While N4L works to keep students safe from harm, pornography represented just 1.4 percent of blocked websites. It also works to keep students focused on learning. Two-thirds of blocked sites were file-sharing, social networking, games, online storage and free software downloads.

Data consumption rising

New Zealand school internet use continues to rise. The N4L network consumed 174 terabytes in term 2. The average consumption is around a gigabyte per student.

N4L CEO Larrie Moore says: “This year we are building our security operations capabilities, providing greater cyber security support to schools and continuing a four-year Ministry of Education programme to upgrade the wireless networks inside schools.”

Spark, Vodafone among top ComCom complaint targets

Spark and Vodafone were the second and third most complained about companies behind Air New Zealand last year. The Commerce Commission says it received 284 complaints about Spark and 266 concerning Vodafone. 2degrees was in ninth place with 84 complaints.

The Commerce Commission points out a complaint does not necessarily mean a company did anything wrong and there's a link between company size and the number of complaints.

Vocus technology behind Sky Broadband

During the quiet news days of the Christmas break Sky Broadband made public its broadband partnership with Vocus. Vocus will provide technical expertise along with network backhaul and other services. Trials of the service began early in December, a full launch is planned later this year. Sky says it is the first provider to supply its broadband customers with a WiFi 6 router.

Vodafone launches WiFi guarantee promotion

Vodafone has launched a promotion giving WiFi mesh routers to customers on more expensive broadband plans. The kicker is that customers who don't end up with house-wide WiFi will either get additional support until they do or a $100 refund. Super WiFi is available to customers on unlimited broadband or the 600 GB wireless broadband plan at no extra charge.

SMEs in survival mode, will increase tech spend

An IDC survey of small and medium businesses found that 60 percent consider themselves to be in survival mode due to the Covid pandemic. Lock-downs and working-from-home have exposed shortcomings in areas such as connectivity, support, security and sourcing technology.

Despite this, IDC says 43 percent expect to spend more on technology in 2021. IDC says cloud, collaboration tools and cybersecurity are likely to be the main areas where spending increases. The research company says SMEs will also need technology and professional services support.

Infratil cloud investment leaps

Infratil, which is part owner of Vodafone, says the value of its investment in CDC Data Centres climbed almost 50 percent in the last three months of 2020. In December an independent valuation priced the business in the range of A$2.04 to A$2.33 billion, this compares with A$1.6 to A$1.8 billion in September.

The company is seeing a surge in demand which means existing data centres will reach capacity sooner than expected.

New Year's Eve mobile data up 80 percent

Vodafone reports New Year's Eve data use on its mobile network was up 80 percent on the year earlier. Customers consumed 630 terabytes. The company also reported a 52 percent increase over Christmas.