The Mobile County Public School System weathered two separate denial-of-service cyber attacks this week that briefly knocked out internet access during standardized testing and a school board meeting, according to district technology officials.
Chief Information Officer David Akridge said the attacks, which hit Tuesday and Wednesday, were traced to servers with IP addresses in China and on the West Coast of the United States, though he cautioned the attacks may not have actually originated in those locations. Unlike high-profile breaches at companies such as Sony Pictures and Target, Akridge said no firewalls were breached and no personal information, including student records, was accessed or stolen.
We feel like right now we have it fixed, Akridge said, adding that he was proud the system’s defenses held.
According to Akridge, the attacks flooded the district’s firewall with a barrage of automated traffic, effectively overwhelming its internet connection rather than penetrating internal systems. He said the first attack Tuesday appeared aimed at probing for vulnerabilities, while Wednesday’s attack seemed designed to exploit any weak points identified a day earlier.
Each disruption lasted about 30 minutes, but the timing proved troublesome: schools throughout the county were in the midst of ACT Aspire standardized testing, one of the only computer-based testing rollouts in the state. Susan Smith, who oversees the district’s research and accountability office, said students at roughly 72 schools experienced some kind of disruption during testing.
District officials said no student will be penalized for incomplete tests as a result of the outages, and staff are coordinating with the Alabama State Department of Education to give affected students another chance to finish. Akridge said the precise number of schools with affected computer labs was hard to pin down but confirmed it was significant across the system.
The episode is a reminder of the vulnerability school districts face as more instruction and testing shifts online, even for systems that do not typically consider themselves prime targets for hackers.