Penn-Harris-Madison says school week will go on as scheduled
MISHAWAKA, Ind. -- Penn Harris Madison Corporation School District sent out a parent notification around 9:30 am indicating that the breach was a ransomware attack from an external source.
The ransomware affected Skyward and Canvas, the two systems students rely on to complete and turn in assignments but were unable to do so because of the data breach.
Mike Chapple, a teaching professor on Information Technology at Notre Dame says these attacks start with a simple click and lead to devastating effects.
“So that's the most likely scenario here is one of the staff or faculty at PHM did something like that, opened an email with a malicious attachment, and then the ransomware got onto their system and possibly spread from there.” said Chapple
The professor recommended the best defense against future attacks is a combination of strong security software, regular software updates and educating staff and students how to identify the suspicious emails and pop-ups.
“You have to take your systems offline, and then they're not doing what they need to be doing on a day-to-day basis, and hopefully you have good backups, because the best thing you can do then is to clear the system off completely, rebuild it from scratch, and then restore your data from those backups.” said Chapple
As a precaution- all network connected desktop computers have been shut off, but students and staff can still use their laptops, Wi-Fi and cloud-based apps safely.
A Penn High School student, Landen Gavros, hopes the district will take stronger measures to prevent future disruptions, especially considering that this is not the district's first time experiencing a breach.
“I know this isn't the first year this has happened, and I'm hoping that they'll take the initiative to kind of figure out what to go on and like, why this keeps happening, " said Gavros
The PHM Technology team has consulted with experts to investigate the situation, and they plan to provide updates as they learn more about what caused the breach.
The school district sent out an update around 4:30 pm indicating they are working diligently alongside their cybersecurity partners to investigate and restore access for students and plans to resolve all technical issues by tomorrow.
Officials confirmed in their recent parent notification that today was a normal school day, but they did experience some Wi-Fi connection issues, at this time they can confirm that this will not affect this week’s planned assessments.