Greenwood Case Study

Greenwood Community Schools

Restoring Critical Infrastructure After a Ransomware Event

AT A GLANCE

Greenwood Community Schools

Suburban district located 11 miles south of Indianapolis, IN
Enrollment of 3,974 students across 4 elementary schools, 1 middle school, and 1 high school
- 48.2% economically disadvantaged
- 17.6% special needs

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District Website
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“From zero-day to now, Five Star has been an invaluable partner. They deployed help when we needed it most, rebuilt our network in the days and months after the event, and are now helping plan proactive cybersecurity measures to protect us going into the future. If your district is faced with a challenge, no matter how small, you can have the peace of mind that Five Star will have teams of K-12 tech experts ready to help you tackle it.”

Jenna Cooper
Technology Director

The Challenge

Greenwood Community Schools experienced a widespread ransomware event involving both critical infrastructure and end user devices. With a newly hired technology director, Greenwood Community schools was tasked with responding and remediating this incident. Compounding this problem was the lack of a next generation toolset for handling such incidents. Limited endpoint management further complicated this issue as well.

The Solution

From the onset, Five Star Technology Solutions was able to work with both Administrators and IT staff to triage the incident and develop a plan of action in the coming days.

This process involved working with an existing MSP to identify and prioritize the restoration of critical infrastructure, the selection and deployment of a next generation endpoint protection solution, and the mobilization of Five Star technical resources to assist with onsite remediation efforts.

Critical infrastructure was restored within 24 hours of the initiation of the response plan and all endpoints were updated with a next generation endpoint solution, scanned, and verified cleaned over the course of three days.

Benefits

Ongoing Partnership

Once the initial issue was addressed, Five Star became an engineering partner with Greenwood Community Schools. Armed with the knowledgebase of our entire engineering team and a fixed rate for services, the IT staff no longer has to manage server updates & upgrades, eRate deployments, and network infrastructure. Greenwood has a trusted partner for help and advice who isn’t invoicing them each time they put in a ticket. The labor savings from not having to upgrade and patch the infrastructure alone pays for the fixed rate agreement.

Proactive Cybersecurity Monitoring

24/7 monitoring of critical infrastructure including servers, switches, firewalls, and user endpoints (staff computers) allows school leaders to rest easier. Threats can now be detected and isolated without causing harm to the entire environment.