Suburban DC faculty district responds to cyberattack

Prince George’s County Public Faculties — one of many largest faculty districts in america — introduced on Monday that it found a cyberattack on its community.

The district is the second-largest in Maryland and serves greater than 130,000 college students within the Washington, D.C., suburbs. Officers didn’t reply to requests for remark.

District leaders initially stated they had been working to handle a “broad community outage” that knocked out e mail and different companies. On Monday night time, the district released a statement saying 4,500 of the system’s 180,000 accounts had been “impacted.”

The assertion doesn’t clarify whether or not “impacted” means the accounts had been merely accessed or if they’d delicate knowledge stolen from them. The affected accounts primarily belonged to workers members, the assertion stated.

“The varsity system remains to be assessing the complete scope of this incident, however as of this time, the principle enterprise and pupil data programs — Oracle and SchoolMAX — don’t look like impacted,” officers stated.

“Important community programs have been restored and extra features will proceed to be introduced again on-line tonight; nevertheless, out of an abundance of warning, all PGCPS customers will probably be required to reset their passwords on Tuesday, Aug. 15.”

Impacted customers will probably be contacted with extra details about their accounts as soon as a cybersecurity agency finishes its investigation of the incident, PGCPS stated.

The district posted an identical message on its web site, including that any workers members who registered accounts with the county’s self-service password device would wish to reset their passwords. Some academics wrote on Fb that the web page to vary their password was not working.

The assault comes because the district prepares for the primary day of faculty on August 28. The remark part of the district’s Twitter assertion was stuffed with questions on whether or not class schedules for academics would nonetheless be launched.

The district didn’t reply to requests for remark about that or whether or not the incident was a ransomware assault.

The assault on PGPCS can be the most recent in a string of incidents affecting the most important faculty districts within the U.S. in 2023. All through the final faculty yr, dozens of faculties in Minnesota, Iowa, West Virginia, California, Pennsylvania, New Hampshire, Arizona, Massachusetts and extra handled outages in addition to the theft of delicate pupil and worker knowledge.

Down the street in Washington

The issue has turn out to be so regarding to the U.S. authorities that first woman Jill Biden reorganized her schedule as a way to attend a White Home-led “Cybersecurity Summit for Okay-12 Faculties” final week.

Senior Biden administration officers introduced a slate of measures on the occasion — together with elevated cybersecurity funding and personal sector collaboration — designed to handle the spate of cyberattacks.

Officers famous {that a} evaluation had proven that the White Home had restricted regulatory authority over the schooling sector, prompting it to take different steps to handle the problem.

“It is crystal clear: we should take cyberattacks on our colleges simply as critically as we take bodily assaults on crucial infrastructure,” Deputy Schooling Secretary Cindy Marten advised reporters.

“That is why, as we head again to highschool, it is vital we carry everybody collectively so we may also help be certain that our colleges are properly geared up with the required steerage and in addition assist in order that we will elevate consciousness of this difficulty.”