Alabama State Department of Education confirms cyber attack on its internal network

The Alabama State Department of Education said it experienced a data security incident that compromised the sensitive personal information of staff, students and their parents.

 

In a recent press conference, Alabama’s State Superintendent of Education Eric Mackey said that on June 17, the department’s IT team detected suspicious activity in its internal network. The team took immediate steps to secure the affected systems, and stopped the “attempted cyber attack” in the process.

 

The department has launched an investigation, with assistance from external cyber security experts, to determine how the threat actors infiltrated the systems and the nature of the data accessed by them.

 

Mackey added that the department’s systems are now up and running, however, it had to take the website offline to make some adjustments after the data security incident. At the time of writing, the Alabama State Department of Education’s website was still offline.

 

A Department spokesperson added that the threat actors who infiltrated its network were able to access some data and disrupt certain services. The department’s IT team is trying to use data backups to run its systems.

 

“While we still do not know the exact content of the information, it is possible that the hackers breached both student and employee data, including some personally identifiable information,” the Alabama State Department of Education said in its press conference.

 

The state education department has notified state and federal law enforcement authorities, the Alabama Attorney General and the state’s Office of Information Technology and is working with them to resolve the issue.