After speaking with PHM’S Technology Director, Matthew Hapke confirms this is not your ordinary email phishing scam and it was a sophisticated attack by a group of criminals.

“Fortunately for us, we did have decent security in place. We did have all of those layers of the onion that your cybersecurity team needs, and we were able to keep them, fend them off long enough that they never got to anything decent, and I don't believe we were ever in trouble as far as them getting to employee IDs and social security numbers, any of that, that stuff was never compromised and never even touched,” said Hapke.

The hackers were able to get access to the district's home folders after three days of attempting to breach the database; they were able to access one percent of the files inside of the district’s home folder.

“The home folders for my staff and students are where you store your Word docs and your spreadsheets. When you're done working on them. If you're not on the cloud, you store them in your documents folder. And your documents folder is what we have on the network,” continued Hapke.

Student platforms like Canvas were not recovered the same day of the breach, and teachers and students did not have access until Friday, March 7.

Skyward or Parent Square was never impacted by the breach and had no impact on students and their ability to turn in assignments.

Penn Harris Madison School Corporation's security barriers block hundreds of hacking attempts daily and while this did not impact students' records, financial information the technology and forensics team are still combing through what exactly was found in those files.

The expense of the investigation has not been revealed at this time but once officials ensure that forensics has concluded the investigation, they plan to let us know.

As tech experts continue working to protect the district's network even with hefty cyber protection it’s hard to say this attack can’t happen again.

"Cyber-attacks are happening all the time on every network. We get from 100 to 1000 cyber prods every single day that we reject, unfortunately, as we fix things and patch things, new leaks and new penetrations are found. It's a forever moving target,” Finished Hapke.