Summary: This case study highlights how the College of Polytechnics Jihlava in Czech Republic implemented campus-wide protective DNS (PDNS) with Whalebone Immunity in under an hour, safeguarding 2,000 students and staff against online threats.
How to Efficiently Protect 2,000 Students and Hundreds of Devices in the School Building and Dormitories
The College of Polytechnics Jihlava (VŠPJ) is a public higher education institution focused on applied education. Its mission is to offer a diverse range of study programs based primarily on the needs of the regional labor market. It educates 2,000 students and employs approximately 250 people.
The IT department is responsible for all of the university’s IT needs. As they say, they “keep everything running.”
The challenge
The College of Polytechnics Jihlava needs to protect both its employees and students using the university network. When it comes to protecting students, it is not feasible to consider a solution that would need to be installed on individual endpoint devices.
Students connect to the internet either via the Eduroam network or through wired connections in the dormitories. The highest number of intercepted threats had been recorded in the dormitories.
Interest in Whalebone arose from this practical need. “I found the concept of DNS protection appealing, so we decided to test it out, and it proved to be effective.. What I appreciated most was that it protects users without requiring neither complex configuration, nor a need to inspect data packets,” explained Martin Skoumal, Head of IT at the college.
The solution
“We were intrigued by the approach of filtering out harmful domains at the DNS level, as this is not a feature our firewall offers,” Skoumal explained. “I received instructions for the resolver deployment and, based on that, made Whalebone operational in less than an hour. The configuration was straightforward and went smoothly.”
Deployment was quick and straightforward. Protection was introduced gradually, starting with the employee network.
The IT team then extended protection to students connected via the Eduroam network as well as through wired connections in the dormitories. There, a significant increase in harmful domains blocked by Whalebone was observed.
The result
"Whalebone now protects both the school building and the dormitories. It runs smoothly with Eduroam – it works the same as when used in any other network," added Skoumal.
The college sees the main value of Whalebone in prevention and in extending protection beyond the capabilities of standard antivirus programs and firewalls, which advanced threats can bypass. “If antivirus or firewall tools miss the threat, we risk restoring compromised systems or credential theft,” said Skoumal. “We use content filtering related to criminal activities – drugs, weapons, and similar topics, which shows up mainly among students,” explains Martin Skoumal. This is a common requirement among educational institutions and other customers who provide network access beyond their employee teams, such as municipal offices, shopping centers, or public institutions.
Additionally, Whalebone automatically sends threat reports to administrators, allowing them to identify the most serious issues on the network.
Do you want to learn more about Immunity?