One of Canada's largest school districts, the Toronto Catholic School District School Board (TCDSB), educating over 90,000 students in 201 elementary and secondary schools, has selected Cenzic Hailstorm to secure the district's web applications throughout the software development life cycle (SDLC).
The district's computer sciences department is responsible for building and managing web applications, many of which contain highly sensitive information -- from students' personal information to report cards to credit recovery to a data integration platform for decision making. In the past, consultants would review code on an ad-hoc basis with static assessments, but as web applications grew in complexity, and hackers became more sophisticated, the district needed to implement a process to automate software vulnerability assessments with frequent security checks that would protect them against the latest hacks.
"The impact of a security hack can be devastating ... we have personal information for 93,000 students," said John Brighton, senior systems manager, student applications at Toronto Catholic District School Board.
TCDSB has implemented a process by which security assessment takes place throughout the SDLC. Applications are tested before going into production, and are continually tested in production to stay ahead of new vulnerabilities. Their subscription to Cenzic features proactive weekly updates to prevent the latest hacks, which can be run overnight and reviewed and addressed first thing in the morning.
"With both the rate of new vulnerabilities introduced and the sophistication of hackers increasing, Cenzic is dedicated to empowering corporations, universities, and government agencies with the solutions they need to keep their applications safe from hackers," said Mandeep Khera, vice president of marketing at Cenzic. "With all the buzz around AJAX and Web 2.0, we provide customers with a great solution to deal with those issues. However, once you cut through the buzz, a vast majority of the apps are still on Web 1.0 and there are thousands of vulnerabilities lingering including Cross-Site Scripting, SQL Disclosure, Session Hijacking to name a few. Customers need to worry about all these vulnerabilities in both their production and new applications. We are excited to be working with a knowledgeable organization like Toronto Catholic."
