On the very first day of virtual learning, a Texas school district has made it official that it became a victim of a cyber attack that disrupted virtual classes for 48 minutes. However, the good news is that the IT staff of the school district was swift enough to thwart the Denial of service cyber attack, neutralizing its repercussions to full extent.
The school district that is in discussion is based on the City of Humble, Texas, United States and is known as ‘The Humble Independent School District (Humble ISD) ’.
Liz Celania- Fagan, the Superintendent of Humble ISD, has confirmed the incident via twitter and informed the world that the virtual classes that were impacted by the cyber incident were back online after a break of nearly an hour.
Liz mentioned in her statement that all those students who were logged into the classes via their student Gmail accounts might not be able to log into their student email accounts until the incident is technically resolved.
Note- A denial of service attack aka distributed denial of service attack is launched through botnets that aim to shut down a computer network by bombarding it with fake web traffic.
Meanwhile, The Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI) has issued a nationwide alert that all school districts that are planning for virtual classes for this academic year should take adequate Cybersecurity measures as there is a high possibility that their servers might be targeted by ransomware.
“As many of the K-12 schools are planning virtual classes from September, it makes them vulnerable to cyber attacks such as ransomware”, says Corey Harris, a special agent of FBI.
There is a good chance that hacking groups might be after social security numbers and other faculty or staff info added Harris.
Hope, the CIOs or CTOs of school districts have taken a note of the ransomware alert issued by FBI targeting K-12 schools.
