There is a growing concern in the South Bay over the possibility that a cyber-attack is what caused the internet outage that has many students and teachers continuing with their lesson plans without any online tools.
“My girls have been coming home telling me that they’ve been sharing a hotspot and using their own devices,” said Wandelyne Hiley who has three children attending different schools in the Sweetwater Union High School District.
“There is no communication between teachers and parents,” she added.
But there is another concern that seems to be growing with each passing day. Was the internet outage due to a cyber-attack?
Get San Diego local news, weather forecasts, sports and lifestyle stories to your inbox. Sign up for NBC San Diego newsletters.
“We want to know what’s going on. Is it a safety issue? Is it something that’s going on with technology and they just haven’t gotten a handle on it”? Wandelyne asked.
NBC 7 asked the school directly on behalf of many parents and students whether they were dealing with a data breach or a ransomware attack. They sent over the following statement Tuesday:
“Sweetwater Union High School District (“SUHSD”) is aware of an information technology systems outage affecting the district and is conducting a thorough investigation. After learning of this incident, we immediately began an investigation to determine the cause and scope of the incident. This outage has had a limited impact on school operations, including the loss of some systems utilized by teachers and staff including email. We are working to restore these systems. We want our students and the SUHSD community to know that we place a high value on maintaining the integrity and security of the data we hold in our systems, and we are working diligently to complete our investigation of the incident. We will provide an additional update once our investigation is complete.”
Local
“Schools should really be transparent and proactive,” said Sai Hooda who is the CEO of CyberCatch out of San Diego.
“Schools have a lot of data and the bad guys want to get the data, steal it, sell it on the dark web, make some money off of it, and also they want to install ransomware and try to get a payout from the school,” he said.
He added that a CyberCatch scan of thousands of school websites concluded that in San Diego County, 78% of schools have a vulnerability in their websites that could easily be exploited by cyber-criminals.
He recommends parents to be vigilant on how the internet outage plays out with the school district and check credit reports just in case something suspicious pops up.
Hiley says she hopes the issue is resolved quickly and as transparent as possible.
