On September 20th, Northshore School District servers were compromised by a cyber attack that left many online systems non-operational. The district then shut down all remaining systems in order to prevent the breach from accessing any further facilities.
“There is no evidence at this time that any student, family or staff data has been compromised,” the district said in an official statement. “We are working with law enforcement and industry experts to continue investigating and to remedy the situation as quickly as possible, but anticipate that outages will likely be several days in duration.”
In her newsletters on September 26th and October 4th, Superintendent Michelle Reid said that the district was actively working to solve technology issues across the district. “Synergy is partially up and it is now being hosted in the Cloud,” Reid said in her latter bulletin. In the same newsletter, she shared her expectation that ParentVue and StudentVue would be fully accessible by the end of that week.
Despite these hopes, students were unable to use StudentVue to check their grades until October 14th. Assistant Principal Shawn Rainwater said that the loss of the Synergy system was a significant part of the cyberattack. “We do all our grading [and attendance] digitally on there,” Rainwater said. “The biggest impact for the individual students was not being able to see grades, get grade updates and see missing work.”
Although Synergy has now been restored, Adobe programs remain affected and all Chrome devices remain unable to print.
For individual students, classes that require external servers and softwares have
been especially impacted. For example, the Computer Science classes have been considerably affected due to the loss of the shared class M-drive, which was used to turn in and send out material.
In the end, however, Rainwater said that he felt that teachers were able to overcome all the challenges created by the cyberattack.
“What could’ve been a lot worse wasn’t really that big of a deal,” Rainwater said.
“[The teachers] handled it like the true professionals they are. Our staff is fantastic.”
