A security breach in the RPS Microsoft accounts left all public schools in Reading without email, Google, Clever, and other learning tools for a week.
On Thursday, September 26th, a statement over the morning announcements of the Reading Memorial High School informed staff and students that all Microsoft-related accounts would be inaccessible for an unknown period of time. Applications such as Outlook, Google Classroom, Smart Pass, and more were rendered useless for almost a full week.
The Reading Schools Superintendent, Dr. Milaschewski, and IT Department head, Mr. Carr, were able to clear up some of the questions students were having. It started on the 26th when Dr. Milaschewski received an email from Microsoft saying that his account was locked due to suspicious activity. And after contacting Mr. Carr, it came to his attention that everybody who was on the school’s server was locked from their accounts. Microsoft’s security software automatically locked all accounts when it detected a breach. Meaning that the situation could have been a lot worse without Microsoft’s advanced technology.
Mr. Carr was able to confirm that it seems as though this was not a glitch, but indeed a person who likely had malicious intentions. Although, according to him, “We just don’t know until the forensic analysis is done.” Also, despite the investigation being incomplete, Dr. Milaschewski added that it doesn’t appear that there’s any breach of information or confidentiality.
According to Dr. Milaschewski, the intended plan of the intruder was to delete information, not to sell it for ransom. He stated, “This seems to be something that makes our life more difficult, rather than a breach of people’s personal accounts and information.”
Considering that there was an external factor, Dr. Milaschewski stated that there is a chance that this could happen again. However he also claimed, “We’re hoping that the forensic analysis will reveal information for us on how this happened and allow us to put additional safeguards in place too.”
The whole situation affected school for many days. Ms. Dailey, a photography and photo manipulation teacher, described how the outage affected her classes. All of her classes use the Adobe suite, which is used to photoshop images her students take. And since the Adobe suite is connected directly to students’ email accounts, “The entire all of my classes were unable to access them.”
Ms. Dailey had to find a short term solution to the problem, since all her classes relied on using Adobe. Luckily, she came up with a clever idea on such short notice. “They were required to download a seven day free trial, using their personal email addresses, which was very inconvenient.” She also doesn’t know if Adobe programs will be usable in the future, which would pose a major problem for all of her photography classes.
Now, with Outlook and Google applications starting to be reintroduced, things are starting to go back to normal for most students.
