Servers of Northshore School District got hit with cyberattack

A cyberattack crippled several systems in Northshore School District (NSD), which covers the Bothell, the Kenmore and the Woodinville. On Friday night (i.e. on Sep. 20, 2019), the technology department of Northshore School District discovered that the district servers got hit with a cyberattack that has rendered several systems non-operational.

According to a press release of the district, it has shut down the other systems "out of an abundance of caution", in order to prevent further impact. Some examples of the systems that become non-operational include the student data and the business systems, a number of phone as well as voicemail services, the Point of Sale (PoS) systems for the school lunches, as well as ParentVUE/StudentVUE (which allow access to grades, communication with teachers, and allow access to assignments). At present, the email addresses were fully functional.

The families as well as staff have been notified on Sep. 21, 2019, and then again updated on Sep. 22, 2019, with steps that they can take in order to communicate with their schools directly.

The press release of the district after the cyberattack further states that "we are working with law enforcement and industry experts to continue investigating and to remedy the situation as quickly as possible, but anticipate that outages will likely be several days in duration". In the meantime, the technology department of NSD has been innovating as well as creating solutions which will support continued learning along with business, as well as will restore the NSD's technology along with processes as early as possible, states the press release.

As per recent update on the website of the school district, phone as well as voicemail services were restored. However, the systems were still down and were expected to stay unavailable for few more days. As on Sep. 25, 2019, there is still no evidence to believe that the student, staff or family data were compromised.

This does not was the first time when the school district has been targeted. In the year 2016 also, they were attacked. At that time, the hackers have been successful to gain access of around 9,000 students Gmail accounts in the district.

» SPAMfighter News - 10/10/2019