So be true to your school now
Just like you would to your girl or guy
Be true to your school now
And let your colors fly
Be true to your school

— Brian Wilson, The Beach Boys,
Be True To Your School (1963)

When Be True to Your School was a top ten hit in 1963, a hoodlum wannabe or just a malcontented prankster who wanted to show his true feelings about his school, a young vandal might toss a lighted cherry bomb or M-80 down the toilet chute.  Hoping against hope that maybe his little fraction of a piece of TNT might blow up next to a bit of structural weakness in the school's plumbing resulting in an entire building being flooded and classes evacuated.  Ahhh, good times for one and all. Okay, it rarely happened.  But every now and then a guy got lucky.

Today, such acts of teenage vandalism seem somehow quaint.  Today's teenage miscreants are launching DDoS attacks against their schools.  The sheer numbers of cyber attacks against schools is staggering.  The “NETSCOUT Threat Intelligence Report: DDoS in a Time of Pandemic," noted that more than 10 million DDoS attacks occurred in 2020.  Over 120,000 of such attacks were against educational institutions.

In Duxbury, MA, multiple attacks against the school system afflicted the district from December of 2020 through February 2021. Forensics investigators were able to trace the origins of the attacks and locate those responsible.  School Superintendent John Antonucci told the press that “We identified them as members or our school community.”

In September 2020, a junior enrolled in South Miami Senior High School confessed his crime and "admitted responsibility for at least eight distributed-denial-of-service attacks against the Miami-Dade schools’ online learning platform."

Neither is this strictly an American phenomenon or limited to high schools.  In the UK, National Crime Agency (NCA) has launched a new initiative with the hope of educating youngsters of the consequences of launching DDoS attacks.

A study by the NCA's National Cyber Crime Unit (NCCU) discovered that the number of Distributed Denial of Service (DDoS) attacks launched against school networks and websites has more than doubled from 2019 to 2020.

According to the NCCU, many of the referrals were secondary school children, with the average being 15 years old, and the youngest just nine.

Besides the security holes that may exist in any remote computer connection like online learning, the prevalence of booter sites that sell off the shelf software that will perform DDoS attacks against any target has made launching a DDoS attack as easy as ordering from Amazon.  Webopedia describes booter sites as:

A service offered by cyber criminals that provides paying customers with distributed denial of service (DDoS) attack capabilities on demand.  Booter services, or Booters, are Web-based services that do DDoS for hire at very low prices and are very hard to take down.

Booters typically present potential customers with a Web front end that enables the end user to specify a Web site that they want the Booter service to target. Detecting and tracing Booters is complicated by the fact that the Internet service provider (ISP) that the Booter service appears to be hosted from is frequently not where the Booter is really located.

Booter services are frequently used by script kiddies and are responsible for many of the recent DDoS attacks that have received mainstream attention in the news.

Indeed, to launch a cyber attack these days does not require all that much technical expertise.  As Richard Hummel, of NETSCOUT of threat intelligence put it:

“The barrier to entry is superlow, it’s supercheap, and it can work,” [Hummel] says. “It doesn’t take a sophisticated team of people. It can be a disgruntled 16-year-old who doesn’t want to go to school.”

When I was a disgruntled 16 year old who didn't want to school, I just stayed home and watched old movies.  Of course, TV was better then, too.  We're talking B.C., here (Before Cable).  But it was also before the Internet, too.