Cybersecurity protection with Jamf Safe Internet

Cyber security threats in education

Students are online more than ever, including at school. While this can benefit student learning, it also puts students and schools at risk of cyber attacks. This is especially true as schools adapt to increasingly online learning.

Schools are common targets. The U.K. Information Commissioner’s Office reported 349 cyber incidents affecting the education sector in 2023, up 56% from 2022. The top, external incident types in 2023 were:

• Unauthorized access (11%)
• Ransomware (11%)
• Phishing (8%)

Cyber attacks aren’t just a pain on IT staff or district wallets. In an interview by the BBC, employees and students list the effects when schools were forced to take their systems offline after a successful attack. This meant:

• Librarians lost access to their records and had to chase down overdue books
• School lunch queues doubled when payments had to be written down — leaving some students without the food they wanted when their lunch break ended too soon
• Teachers were forced to create new lesson plans that don’t use their technology

So what can schools do to protect themselves from these increasingly costly and common cyber attacks? A successful defense strategy requires layers of protection that cover devices, networks, user accounts and security policies. Your defenses have to prevent outside attackers from getting in, and from insiders accidentally making it easier for bad actors.

Security with Jamf Safe Internet

Let’s talk about how schools can defend their devices from online threats by taking advantage of features in Jamf Safe Internet.

Web threat prevention

Devices need to be protected, even if they are at networks other than the school’s. That’s why Jamf Safe Internet provides web threat prevention right on the device, defending devices from:

• Phishing
• Cryptojacking
• Spam
• Malware

Jamf Safe Internet uses the technology behind Jamf Protect to block all known malicious traffic that puts devices at risk. And admins can block other categories, like social media or adult websites. This solution uses rich threat intelligence to evaluate hostnames, IP address and full URLs, categorizing each to determine whether or not it is safe to load on the device. And Jamf Safe Internet’s on-device capabilities still enforce restrictions if connectivity is lost — meaning students are protected, even if they aren’t on school networks.

All this equals security resilience. Jamf Safe Internet:

• Still works even if you’re on public Wi-Fi or cellular data
• Can’t be circumvented by VPNs or third-party proxies
• Reduces network-based risk by restricting traffic on any network

Safe searching

But what about websites that contain both education and potentially inappropriate content, like Google searches or YouTube? Jamf Safe Internet allows admins to restrict these sites by enforcing Google SafeSearch and YouTube’s Restricted Mode to hide explicit results from YouTube’s search, comments and embedded YouTube videos, and Google search results.

Security with privacy

Jamf Safe Internet isn’t a monitoring tool to watch student activity. Instead, it gives students the opportunity to explore their curiosity and creativity on the internet — while defending them from potential dangers. With on-device protection, student behavior doesn’t get sent to data centers where their data can be analyzed; it stays on the device, leading to quicker responses and private protection.

New in Jamf Safe Internet

Are you already using Jamf Safe Internet? We made a recent update to the UI to make administration easier. The Web protection policy page was recently updated with new tabs for easier navigation. This update separates security rules from the existing filters for more granular control.