What did the NCSC announce?

In early October 2024, the National Cyber ​​Security Center announced that its PDNS service for schools is now available to multi-academy trusts, academies, independent schools and school Internet Service Providers (ISPs). As a leading educational ISP, we have prepared an explanation of what this means for schools.

What is a PDNS service? And how does it work?

PDNS stands for Protective Domain Name System, a security system designed to keep you safe when surfing the Internet. It’s a way to block access to known malicious or suspicious online destinations, such as websites known to host malware, ransomware, viruses, and other cybersecurity threats.

To connect to a website or other Internet resource, your device sends a request to a DNS service to convert the website’s name (such as rm.com) to its IP address, a set of numbers which lets your device know where to find that site. . The DNS system is like a dictionary of foreign languages ​​that translates from one to another.

Protective DNS intervenes during this process to check whether the requested site is safe or may lead to dangerous or malicious content, such as a phishing or malware site. If the PDNS service detects that the website may be harmful, it blocks the connection and prevents your device from reaching the site. Other traffic flows to the destination normally.

What does this mean for RM broadband customers?

The NCSC announcement tells educational institutions to ask their DNS provider to register for PDNS. The ISP is usually the DNS provider.

RM Broadband customers do not need to take any action, in fact changing your RM DNS may affect other RM Services. As part of our ever-evolving suite of protection services we offer our customers, RM has worked with NCSC to deploy PDNS across our estate and are currently in trial with a number of RM broadband schools.

This addition will be part of our additional protection services provided on your broadband service. RM’s PDNS rollout is in the final stages of development and testing and will be rolled out in the coming weeks. This will be included as part of your broadband service without any additional changes and will provide additional protection to schools of all types, not just those mentioned in the NCSC notice.

If you are not a RM broadband customer, you should ask your broadband provider about their plans to implement the NCSC PDNS service. If they can’t provide this important protection, consider switching to one that can – RM.