Organization: Monongalia County Schools
Technology Solution: adam:ONE® Zero Trust Connectivity (ZTC) featuring Don’t Talk To Strangers (DTTS®) Technology
Sector Landscape & Organizational Challenges
The K-12 Cyber Threat Environment
School network environments face significant threat activity, with weekly cyberattacks surging by 41% across the administrative landscape. Despite handling critical data assets, over 80% of school districts operate without comprehensive security frameworks. Human-targeted exploits outpace pure technical software vulnerabilities by 45%, placing a heavy burden of perimeter defense onto individual educators and staff members who are targeted by AI-enhanced phishing and credential harvesting attacks. Compounding this challenge, 86% of impacted school districts must manage their infrastructure with small security teams of fewer than five staff members.
Technical Solution: Preemptive Zero Trust Connectivity
Monongalia implemented adam:ONE® featuring its patented Don’t Talk To Strangers (DTTS®) technology to secure district faculty and administrative systems. Rather than reacting to threats after they breach the network or relying solely on threat intelligence lists of known bad domains, adam:ONE® enforces a strict Default Deny All posture. The platform dynamically regulates outbound and inbound connections, ensuring network traffic is strictly limited to pre-verified, safe destinations.
By preventing unverified endpoints from communicating with internal network devices, adam:ONE® stops malware execution, credential exfiltration, and ransomware callbacks before an exploit can complete its lifecycle.
Operational Refinements & IT Leadership Experience
In addition to direct threat mitigation, the IT Manager highlighted several key operational and workflow improvements following the implementation of adam:ONE®:
- 75%+ Reduction in EDR Noise: By stopping malicious connections at the network edge, fewer threats reached endpoint devices. This resulted in an immediate reduction in EDR alert noise by over 75%, allowing staff to shift focus away from constant threat chasing.
- Network Visibility & Debt Resolution: The deployment process exposed underlying network misconfigurations that had previously gone unnoticed under traditional monitoring tools. Resolving these issues strengthened overall network integrity.
- Centralized ACL Management: Managing Access Control Lists shifted from manual, local file edits on individual devices to centralized policy management within the adam:ONE® dashboard. Standard policies can now be assigned rapidly, reducing configuration errors and preventing circumvention.
- Strategic Workload Realignment: While the overall management workload remained active, the nature of the work transformed. IT leadership transitioned from reactive firefighting to proactively embedding Zero Trust principles across the broader infrastructure.
“While traditional security systems attempt to protect the network after the damage is already done, adam:ONE® reshapes the Internet to only allow what is verified to be good. It provides Monongalia County Schools with a true Zero Trust connectivity model and a Default Deny All posture, neutralizing undetectable threats before they even become known.”
Future strategy with adam:ONE®
Moving forward, we intend to utilize adam:ONE® to fluidly address the unique network and security needs of our two core K-12 pillars.
- Student Protection: We will continue leveraging the platform to deny proxy connections and bypass attempts to ensure network integrity. We will also strictly enforce content protection by filtering out streaming media, shareware and freeware, adult pornography, and weapons-related content.
- Faculty Protection: We plan to heavily utilize the system’s Zero Trust capabilities to protect staff from sophisticated phishing campaigns and ensure no data exfiltration via unknown C2 channels.
