‘Network incident’ shut down internet at all schools for 24 hours.
A weekend cyber hack left the Columbia School District without internet services, a problem which wasn’t fully resolved until Monday around midnight, according to school district officials.
“There was a network incident,” Superintendent Lex Carswell said Tuesday. “This is bigger. It wasn’t a cyber attack, it was a network incident.”
According to Carswell, on Saturday afternoon around 3:30 p.m. the district’s firewall detected there was unusual suspicious activity and the firewall started fighting against it.
“It’s under investigation,” Carswell said of the incident. “We’re working diligently to find out what happened. We just know we came under a network incident.”
The network incident impacted the entire school district.
“All of our servers went down,” Carswell said. “We were without internet from Saturday night to about midnight (Monday) night.”
Carswell credited the school district’s technology department’s staff for quickly addressing and alleviating the problem.
“Our tech person, Patrick Mitchell (School District Director of Technology) and his staff have worked since Saturday afternoon about 3 o’clock — pretty much 24 hours straight,” Carswell said. “That’s the reason why we’re open and back up and running so quick as of this morning.”
While the investigation is ongoing, Carswell said the school district has not lost any data or suffered any data breaches.
Carswell said the school district’s tech department saw the suspicious activity Saturday afternoon and immediately began working on the problem.
“They’ve been working ever since,” he said. “We’ve probably had 20 meetings in the last three days on it. It’s an ongoing investigation that we’re still meeting about.”
The school district’s insurance firm has recommended a cyber attack security firm that’s working with the district to mitigate the situation.
Although the district’s internet services have been restored, Carswell said the district is being cautious as it moves forward.
“Our internet is working, but it’s more intranet than it is internet,” he said. “We’re not allowing anything to come from the worldwide web into our district servers.”
Carswell did not give specifics on what led to the network disruption incident or how it may have occurred.
“There’s bad people in the world,” he said. “I think there are people out there that do this full time just to try to cause problems and create havoc for entities like ours… I’m sure in a few days or weeks we’ll be able to give information about where it happened and what happened, but because it’s under investigation we can’t really say a whole lot as far as where we think it came from.”
The school district has put additional safety measures in place to prevent any additional problems.
“We’ll probably add more and more the next few days,” Carswell said. “The safety of our students and staff is our first priority, right. Well the safety of our students and staff’s data is right behind that. We’re going to keep working. We have not lot any data to our knowledge and we are going to put additional measures in place.”
Carswell said he does not believe the origin of the incident was from a local source.
He added there has been no ransom attached to the incident.
“We have not received any demands for anything,” he said. “I think it was just people just wanting to shut us down and they did for 24 hours.”