Salt Lake City School District computer servers were hit by a cyberattack over the weekend. Jason Olsen is the spokesman for the district. He says no private information was taken but phone service had been interrupted and PowerSchool, the student information system, was shut down.
“Our IT department has been able to set up some back door access for our employees to get to PowerSchool, which is especially important right now because it’s the end of the term, says Olsen, “We need to enter grades and everything else. But right now the students and parents aren’t able to access that.”
Dan Bowden is the chief information security officer for the University of Utah. He says it’s interesting that an individual school system would be targeted.
“It’s hard to understand how or why it would be picked unless the attacker had some personal situation or maybe they were just kind of looking around for sites and looking for vulnerable sites,” Bowden says, “which there are a lot of people on the internet always looking for sites.”
Bowden says it was most likely a form of cyber vandalism or an attack similar to the one in 2012 by the group Anonymous as a form of protest against the Salt Lake City Police Department.
Story Update Wednesday, November 4th: Jason Olsen of the Salt Lake City School District told KUER everything is up and running normally now. He said it is very difficult to track down who may have been responsible for the attack.