Use Case
DDoS Protection for
Universities & Education
Campus networks serve thousands of students, faculty, and research systems simultaneously. When a DDoS attack hits, it disrupts classes, research data transfers, and administrative systems across the entire institution. Flowtriq detects attacks in under 1 second and auto-mitigates with kernel-level firewall rules, BGP FlowSpec, RTBH, and upstream cloud scrubbing, keeping your campus online.
The Problem
Education networks face unique DDoS risks
Universities are high-value targets. They host sensitive research data, process financial aid transactions, run hospital systems, and serve as critical infrastructure for their communities. Hacktivist groups target universities during politically charged events. Students with too much free time and access to booter services launch attacks from inside the network.
Campus networks are sprawling and heterogeneous. A single institution may run dozens of subnets across multiple buildings, data centers, and cloud providers. Traditional DDoS appliances designed for a single chokepoint cannot cover this kind of distributed architecture without significant investment in hardware at every ingress point.
When an attack takes down the campus LMS during finals week or disrupts a live research data feed, the impact goes beyond inconvenience. Grades get delayed, grant-funded experiments lose data, and IT teams spend days investigating instead of supporting their institution's mission.
09:12:30 UDP flood begins targeting LMS server
09:13:15 Campus uplink saturated at 5 Gbps
09:14:00 Students report LMS unreachable
09:18:00 Help desk tickets start flooding in
09:25:00 IT begins manual investigation
09:35:00 Source identified, upstream null route applied
09:35:00 Total downtime: 22 minutes
Students affected: 8,400
Exams delayed: 12
Staff hours: 6
How Flowtriq Helps
Detect and mitigate attacks before students notice
The FTAgent installs on each server or network node across your campus infrastructure. It reads kernel-level network statistics every second and compares them against dynamic baselines. When traffic crosses a threshold, the agent opens an incident, classifies the attack type, and fires firewall rules within the same second.
For campus networks with routers and switches, Flowtriq also ingests sFlow, NetFlow, and IPFIX data from your network equipment. This gives you network-wide visibility across every VLAN, building, and subnet without installing agents on every endpoint.
Your IT security team sees every node and every incident in a single dashboard. When an attack is auto-mitigated, the team gets a Slack or email notification with the full incident report. No manual investigation needed. The LMS stays up, exams proceed on schedule, and research data keeps flowing.
09:12:31 PPS=142,000 BPS=5.1Gbps THRESHOLD
T+0.1s Incident opened · UDP Flood · 96%
T+0.3s Auto-mitigation · nftables rule applied
T+0.5s Alerts fired · Slack · Email
T+0.6s IT team notified · incident report sent
09:12:32 PPS=4,380 BPS=185Mbps MITIGATED
09:25:00 Attack subsides · rules withdrawn
Downtime: 0 seconds
Students affected: 0
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Key Features
Built for campus-scale infrastructure
Multi-campus visibility
Monitor servers, routers, and network segments across multiple campuses from a single dashboard. Group nodes by building, department, or function. Your central IT team and satellite campus admins each see exactly what they need.
4-level auto-mitigation
When an attack is detected, Flowtriq's escalation chain activates automatically. Kernel-level firewall rules drop attack traffic instantly. If the flood exceeds local capacity, BGP FlowSpec filters at the network edge, RTBH black-holes targeted prefixes, and cloud scrubbing absorbs volumetric attacks upstream. Rules auto-withdraw when the attack ends.
Flow-based network monitoring
Ingest sFlow, NetFlow, and IPFIX from campus routers and switches for network-wide DDoS visibility. See traffic patterns across every VLAN and subnet without deploying agents on every endpoint. Combine flow-based and agent-based detection for complete coverage.
Research infrastructure protection
Research clusters, HPC nodes, and data transfer servers carry irreplaceable workloads. Flowtriq monitors these systems individually, ensuring that an attack on one research node does not disrupt others. Full PCAP forensics provide evidence for incident reports to funding agencies.
PCAP forensics and compliance
Every incident includes packet captures from before and during the attack. Download PCAPs for forensic review, share them with law enforcement when attacks originate from booter services, or include them in compliance documentation for auditors and regulatory bodies.
Flexible alerting for IT teams
Route alerts to the right team at the right time. Send Slack notifications for minor incidents, email the CISO for critical attacks, and integrate with ServiceNow or your existing ITSM system via webhooks. Escalation policies make sure nothing falls through the cracks.
SIEM integration
Export attack telemetry in real time to Splunk, Elasticsearch, Microsoft Sentinel, Syslog CEF, and Wazuh. Feed your campus SOC or managed security provider with structured incident data from every node Flowtriq monitors.
Exposure scanning
Scan campus-facing servers for open amplification ports, weak TLS/SSH configurations, missing security headers, and known CVEs. Scheduled rescans alert on new findings automatically, giving your security team continuous vulnerability posture across the campus network.
Getting Started
Deploy across your campus in minutes
Rolling out Flowtriq takes less time than investigating a single DDoS incident manually.
Create your workspace
Sign up at flowtriq.com and create a workspace for your institution. Add your IT security team with admin access. The 14-day free trial starts immediately with no credit card required.
Install agents on critical servers
Deploy the FTAgent on your LMS servers, research nodes, DNS servers, and other critical infrastructure. The agent installs with a single command and runs as a lightweight systemd service with near-zero CPU overhead.
Connect campus routers (optional)
Configure sFlow, NetFlow, or IPFIX export on your campus routers and switches. Point the flow data at Flowtriq for network-wide DDoS visibility across every VLAN and subnet.
Configure alerts and mitigation
Connect Flowtriq to Slack, email, PagerDuty, or your ITSM system. Define mitigation policies per node or globally. Enable auto-mitigation for high-confidence attack types.
Monitor and tune
Within hours, Flowtriq learns your campus traffic baselines and sets dynamic thresholds automatically. Review the analytics dashboard to understand traffic patterns and tune thresholds for specific nodes or network segments.
By the Numbers
The impact on campus operations
Before & After
How Flowtriq transforms campus DDoS response
Without Flowtriq
- Attacks detected minutes after they start
- IT staff manually investigates each incident
- LMS and research systems go offline during attacks
- Students and faculty flood the help desk
- No forensic evidence for post-incident reports
- Upstream null routes take entire servers offline
With Flowtriq
- Detection in under 1 second per node
- Automatic classification with confidence score
- Per-node mitigation isolates the attack target
- Campus services stay online during attacks
- Full PCAP capture for forensic analysis
- Surgical firewall rules drop only attack traffic
Pricing
Simple per-node pricing for education
Monitor your LMS servers, research clusters, DNS infrastructure, and campus routers from a single workspace. No bandwidth fees, no overage charges, no minimum commitments. Flow sources (sFlow/NetFlow/IPFIX from routers) available from $19/source/month.
FAQ
Common questions from education IT teams
Can Flowtriq protect multiple campus locations from one dashboard?
Yes. Each campus, building, or network segment runs its own FTAgent instance, and all of them report to a single workspace dashboard. Your NOC team gets a unified view across every location. Role-based access lets you give department IT staff read-only views of their own network segments.
How does Flowtriq handle legitimate traffic spikes during enrollment or exams?
Flowtriq uses dynamic baselines that learn your normal traffic patterns over time. Enrollment surges and exam-period spikes follow predictable patterns with normal connection types. DDoS floods arrive as sudden bursts of malformed or single-protocol packets. Flowtriq classifies by traffic composition, not just volume.
Does it work with our existing campus firewall and SIEM?
Yes. The FTAgent supports iptables, nftables, and ufw for local mitigation. It also exports structured telemetry to Splunk, Elasticsearch, Microsoft Sentinel, Syslog CEF, and Wazuh in real time. Your existing security operations workflow stays intact.
What about student-originated attacks from inside the network?
Flowtriq detects anomalous traffic regardless of source. If a compromised student device or campus machine begins generating flood traffic, the agent on the target node detects and mitigates it the same way it handles external attacks. Internal attack sources show up in the incident report with full traffic characterization.
Is there an academic or education discount?
Flowtriq offers volume discounts for large deployments. Contact our sales team to discuss pricing for your institution. The standard price is $9.99/node/month with no minimum commitment, and flow sources for router monitoring start at $19/source/month.
Related Use Cases
Flowtriq for public sector and enterprise
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