ICN News
Student SYBAC Nominations, Deadline Approaching Soon
Help us find our next round of students that make up our Statewide Youth Broadband Advisory Council (SYBAC)!
The ICN is now accepting nominations for the 2024-2025 school year through May 31. Any Iowa high school student in grades 10-12 can apply.
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Learn more about ICN's SYBAC program and submit your nomination today!
In Case You Missed Our Zoom News...
Supporting Iowa's Education by Fulfilling Bandwidth Requests
ICN continues to be a crucial Internet service provider for Iowa’s K-12 education community. Schools and libraries can use our Internet, data, and firewall services to keep their buildings connected and safe through the FCC’s E-Rate program.
The E-rate funding provides discounts towards eligible telecommunications services. To receive E-Rate discounts, K-12 schools and libraries are required to use competitive bidding and award services based upon best value (primarily cost).
Read more about our E-Rate highlights.
Case Study
Deploying a Firewall Management Solution
Southwestern Community College, Creston, Iowa
Business Challenge
Prior to switching to the ICN managed firewall service, SWCC was using a Cisco firewall that was cumbersome for the SWCC team to operate. Their team could perform the necessary changes and updates, but they never felt like they were using it to its maximum potential. That is when they started to look for alternatives that better fit their needs.
Solution
SWCC hired a security firm to help them in getting their security needs more on track. Their firewall needed to be updated and maintained, so that was one of their first priorities.
Learn how ICN helped SWCC with their security improvements.
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The Network Minute
Every month we will highlight a network benefit to help Iowans gain a better understanding of the advantages offered by the statewide fiber optic Network.
The ICN, a Closed Telecom Network
The closed telecom Network term perfectly describes the ICN statewide infrastructure. Our closed network is designed for our customer base of government, healthcare, public safety, and education users.
A closed network benefits our users/customers with enhanced security with larger bandwidth potential, reduced risk of cyberattacks due to controlled access, minimized congestion through traffic control, a focus on firewalls and intrusion detection systems, and network integrity by monitoring performance and streamlining regular maintenance.
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Other News
Better Password Practices
How did you celebrate World Password Day on May 5th? The National Cybersecurity Alliance published tips to keep accounts secure. These tips are helpful in encouraging better habits of password settings and security.
Diving into Verizon’s Data Breach Investigation Report
Verizon released its 2024 Data Breach Investigation Report, which marks its 17th edition of the publication. This year they analyzed 30,458 real-world security incidents, of which 10,626 were confirmed data breaches (a record high!), with victims spanning 94 countries.
There was a substantial increase involving the exploitation of vulnerabilities as the
critical path to initiate a breach when compared to previous years. This showed an increase that nearly tripled (180% increase) from last year. One-third of all breaches involved ransomware. Pure Extortion attacks have risen over the past year and are now a component of 9% of all breaches. These newer techniques resulted in a small decline in ransomware, but combined, this represents a strong growth of 32% of breaches. (Summary of Findings Page 7)
Some key takeaways in looking at industries we serve:
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Educational Services (page 61) - 1,780 incidents, 1,537 with confirmed data disclosure.
- Top patterns: System Intrusion, Social Engineering and Miscellaneous Errors represent 90% of breaches
- Data compromised: Personal (83%), Internal (20%), Other (18%), Credentials (9%) (breaches)
- What is the same? The same three patterns dominate this vertical as last year. External actors stealing personal data accounts for the majority of breaches.
Healthcare (page 64) - 1,378 incidents, 1,220 with confirmed data disclosure.
- Top patterns: Miscellaneous Errors, Privilege Misuse and System Intrusion represent 83% of breaches
- Data compromised: Personal (75%), Internal (51%), Other (25%), Credentials (13%) (breaches)
- What is the same? System Intrusion breaches remain in the top three attack patterns.
Information (page 66) - 1,367 incidents, 602 with confirmed data disclosure.
- Top patterns: System Intrusion, Basic Web Application Attacks and Social Engineering represent 79% of breaches
- Data compromised: Other (46%), Personal (45%), Credentials (27%), Internal (22%) (breaches)
- What is the same? The top three attack patterns have remained constant since last year, and their ranked order has also not changed.
Public Administration (page 69) - 2,599 incidents; 1,314 with confirmed data disclosure.
- Top patterns: Social Engineering, System Intrusion and Miscellaneous Errors represent 85% of breaches.
- Data compromised: Personal (40%), Credentials (38%), Other (33%), Internal (23%) (breaches)
- What is the same? Personal data and Credentials are still the top types of data impacted in this industry.
View all the findings by downloading the full report-Verizon DBIR
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