Highline Public Schools forced to shut all activities following a cyber attack

Highline Public Schools, a Washington-based public school district, said it experienced a data security incident that forced it to shut down all schools and cancel school activities.

 

In an announcement on Monday, Highline Public Schools said that it recently detected unauthorised activity in its internal network and immediately took steps to isolate the affected systems. The school district also launched an investigation, with assistance from external cyber security experts to determine the nature and scope of the incident.

 

Highline said it notified relevant law enforcement authorities about the incident and is working with them to resolve it at the earliest. “All schools are closed on Monday, September 9. All school activities, athletics and meetings are canceled. Central office is open,” it said.

 

In a separate statement, the school district said that it has decided to keep the schools closed on September 10 as well and cancelled all school activities, athletics and meetings. District authorities added that its investigation is still ongoing as critical systems are still offline.

 

In a statement shared with the media, Tove Tupper, the district’s chief communications officer, said, “There are a lot of systems that we rely on to be able to operate schools that we have essentially cut off access to as we investigate.

 

“Transportation, we use a system to determine what buses need to go where that’s an online tool. Attendance tracking, there’s a tool that we need to be able to have access to. So, it’s not that those systems have been compromised at this point. It’s just that we’ve shut off access as we do investigation.

 

“These are not decisions that we take lightly because we know the incredible burden this has on our families and students. We couldn’t bring students into our schools when we knew that it wasn’t safe to do so,” Tupper added.

 

The school district is yet to share details on who is behind the cyber attack or the nature and scope of the same. At the time of writing, no hacker group has claimed responsibility for the cyber attack on Highline Public Schools.