Pembina Trails students, teachers still struggling more than 2 weeks after cyberattack shut down network

December 20, 2024 Canuck

Students and teachers in the Pembina Trails School Division are still in the dark as to when full services for everything from computers to clocks will be restored, more than two weeks after a cyberattack shut down the Winnipeg school division’s entire network.

The outage took down several systems in the southwest Winnipeg division’s 36 schools, including phones, computers, printers and even the clocks.

The attack was discovered after “unusual activity” in the division’s network system, resulting in phone and computer outages, on the morning of Dec. 2.

On Thursday, the division said in an online statement that a database with personal information of former and current students — including health identification numbers, parents or guardians’ contact information and most recent photos — was accessed in the days leading up to Dec. 2.

Another database, with staff information such as banking details, social insurance numbers and compensation details, may also have been accessed in the attack, the division said.

A cybersecurity firm is continuing to investigate and work on restoring their systems, the division’s superintendent said in a memo obtained by CBC.

But staff and students in the division say many services they rely on are still not working.

“The vast majority of buildings across the division, there’s no internet whatsoever,” said one teacher, severely limiting their ability to educate students.

“We’re, I would say, pretty reliant on the internet to help us with our planning and with our teaching,” said the teacher, whom CBC News is not naming because he fears speaking out will impact his job.

He said teachers have lost access to their email, the platform they use to assess students, their lesson plans and other files, some of which he fears may not be recoverable.

“We haven’t been able to print anything to provide the students with any sort of lessons.… We haven’t been able to use our projectors,” he said.

“It’s really been pencil and paper. And we haven’t been able to photocopy either.… Everything that you would normally use in the classroom has been kneecapped.”

Staff have had to figure out workarounds, like connecting to the internet by tethering to their cellphones, at their own expense, the teacher said.

‘Sorry, we can’t do nothing today’

Sabastian Kelly, a Grade 10 student who goes to Shaftesbury High, said some of his teachers have had to print out their lessons at home.

Kelly said that a temporary Wi-Fi network has been set up for teachers to use at his school and other systems are slowly being restored, but classroom learning has still been set back over the last two weeks.

“Some teachers were like, ‘Sorry, we can’t do nothing today.… Everything on my computer was corrupted,” he said.

“A lot of people have told me that in things like computer science and stuff, they’ve literally been watching movies just because they can’t do anything.”

A young man stands in a home with with hands clasped in front of him. — Sabastian Kelly, a Grade 10 student at Shaftesbury High in the Pembina Trails School Division, says classroom learning has been set back over the last two weeks following the cyberattack. (Prabhjot Singh Lotey/CBC)

Kelly said the concerns in the first days of the outage extended beyond lesson plans.

His school’s public address system — which has since been partially restored — wasn’t working for almost a week after the network went offline.

“During that time … I’ve even heard some teachers say, like, ‘What if there’s a lockdown? What if there’s certain emergencies that we need to know about?'” he said, adding that recent threats targeting two schools in the division raised concerns among some students too.

Pembina Trails superintendent Shelley Amos declined to comment, with the division directing media inquiries about the cyberattack to its update page.

CBC News also reached out to the Manitoba Teachers’ Society for comment but had not had a response prior to publication.

‘Everybody is vulnerable’: prof

David Gerhard, a professor and the head of computer science at the University of Manitoba, said systems are a more valuable target for hackers if people rely on them. But whether or not an institution is targeted usually boils down to how exposed it is to attackers, he said.

“We do see that there’s lots and lots of organizations that do fall victim to these cyberattacks fairly regularly, because there are these small organizations,” he said.

“Everybody has an IT presence these days, which means everybody is vulnerable to these attacks.”

The personal data of former and current students and employees at the University of Winnipeg was stolen in a similar incident earlier this year.

It’s hard to know how many of these attacks are happening because a lot of organizations don’t report them, Gerhard said, but he expects more of them in the future.

“It all really comes down to making sure that the software in the system is up to date as possible and training your users, because it only takes one person clicking on a bad link in an email to have the whole thing coming crashing down,” he said.

The division hasn’t provided any timelines as to when the network could be fully restored.

Kelly believes students will bounce back, but said the situation is frustrating.

“For more tech-focused classes, how are we going to finish our work?” he said. “It’s just making things more inefficient.”

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