Houston County Schools

Protecting America’s Most Valuable Asset: Schools

Cybersecurity for Education with Application Allowlisting & Anti-Ransomware

Bob Blalock, Technology Coordinator, Houston County Schools: “We were a Sophos customer for about 10 years and it was time for us to renew our contract. We were having two or three instances a month of getting infected with malware or some kind of crazy virus. That’s a big deal when you have no more support than what we have; just me and another person. We have not experienced that with PC Matic Pro. We’ve been using it for a year now and we’re very pleased with the results.”

“I was skeptical of the whitelist approach when we first started because we have several specialized products that aren’t normal commercialized products. PC Matic Pro’s technical support team worked very closely with me to get it customized and tailored to what we need it to be for the Houston County School System. We’re allowing these products to work, and anything outside of that is being blocked. That stops a lot of junk that would normally come through on a daily basis. I’m dealing with 6,400 students, and about 700 teachers, administrators and support people that are using their computers daily. I need to make sure bad things are blocked and good things are allowed to come through, especially for teachers. They need it to work properly and not give any hiccups during the time it’s running. It’s a big deal to us that it runs smoothly. PC Matic Pro has done a very good job for us.”

Exceptional Customer Service

“The technical support has been great. We can email or call if we have an emergency and they respond very quickly. The PC Matic Pro tech support team created a custom script for us that would remove Sophos and push PC Matic Pro out to our systems. That by itself was a big issue, because we have me and one other guy doing everything. We can never get enough help, and it’s very frustrating at times. So when we run across a vendor like PC Matic Pro that’s willing to help us out this much without charging extra, that’s a big plus for us.”

“They bent over backwards to get the product working the way I need it to work here on our system, and to customize it to make it fit for us and our applications. All of the technical support that they provide me during the year and every day if I have problems, doesn’t cost me anything extra. We’ve been very pleased and we’re going to renew the contract at least for a year, maybe even three years this time.”

PC Matic School Cybersecurity Software Solutions

Cybersecurity threats including ransomware attacks against our nation's school districts are increasing. Only Whitelisting Applications can prevent advanced malware attacks launched by hackers and threat actors that specifically target educational institutions.

Cybercriminals are intent on stealing and ransoming school records including student, teacher, and administrators' personally identifiable information (PII) such as social security numbers, dates of birth, addresses, medical and family data.

Persistent Targeted Ransomware Attacks. With persistent targeted ransom attacks, school districts may be unaware for quite a while that their IT network has been hacked or breached. Cybercriminals are increasingly targeting school districts and boards of education to take operations hostage, steal data and ransom that data for profit.

The best security solution to prevent hacking of school district IT systems for ransom is for the school district IT professionals to use Whitelisting Applications as part of a layered approach to school cybersecurity. Application Allowlisting works together with Application Blacklisting, and endpoint antivirus software to completely secure a district's network, student and teacher devices, endpoints and servers.

Whitelisting solutions with strict application control completely prevents access to hackers, malware, spyware, trojans, zero-day exploits, polymorphous viruses, fileless infections and ransomware. Explore the best application allowlisting solution for schools.