“Unusual activity” forces shutdown of Rainy River District School Board IT systems
Public schools across the Rainy River District School were without certain IT services on Wednesday.
The Rainy River District School Board was forced to shut down its IT system after monitoring what it described as unusual activity the previous night.
Education Director Heather Campbell says the move was precautionary.
“We always are very proactive and work really diligently as far as network security,” says Campbell.
“So we took this as a precaution to investigate and also to protect all our systems and our data while we investigate.”
Parents were notified by early morning phone calls on Wednesday about the issue and provided updates during the day.
Schools were allowed to open, but Campbell says certain online services and programs were not available to staff and students.
“There are so many things that we do rely on information technology for, but there are a lot of things that occur every day within classrooms across our system that do not rely on our information technology infrastructure for, so I am confident that our staff and students are still teaching and learning.”
The outage impacted the board’s Internet service and interrupted grade 10 students from writing the provincewide literacy test.
Campbell says the board’s IT team continues to investigate before bringing services back online.
She says there was no immediate timetable as to when services would be fully restored.
“I’ve heard from my colleagues, and I understand that sometimes these attacks are not immediate, so it’s very important to ensure that we are free from any sort of malicious activity,” says Campbell.
School boards across Ontario and North America have been the target of hackers of late.
Last December, PowerSchool, a system widely used by school boards, including the Rainy River District School Board, was compromised by a cyberattack, impacting an estimated 5.2 million Canadians.
A recent report from the Ontario and Alberta Securities Commissions suggested school boards were not prepared to prevent such an attack.