A school in Buckinghamshire was forced to close for most students on Wednesday due to a suspected cyber-attack.
Great Marlow School asked students to stay at after confirming it was dealing with an incident affecting parts of its ICT network.
It said it was restricting access to the systems as a precaution while investigations continue.
“we are working closely with specialist IT and cybersecurity professionals to fully assess the situation and restore normal operations as quickly and safely as possible,” said headteacher Guy Pendlebury in a statement.
He asked for “patience” during the “necessary precautionary steps”.
The school was unable to students and parents via its usual method of email due to the disruption, and instead used its website and Microsoft Teams.
Year 11 and Year 13 students were told to attend as usual for scheduled external examinations , while internal exams for Year 10 and Year 12 students were postponed.
The disruption also halted teachers’ ability to set work.
The school, which was attended by Olympic rower Steve Redgrave, also said it would rearrange a rowing session for Year 7 students.
Cybersecurity experts say schools are often targeted by financially motivated hackers as they hold large volumes of personal data that can be held to ransom.
The government’s recent Cyber Breaches Survey found 73 percent of secondary schools had experienced an incident in the past 12 months.
“IT estates are often large and highly interconnected with third parties, which means securing these complex environments is highly challenging, yet schools rarely have the resources in house to manage this properly,” said Talion chief executive Keven Knight.
He said schools can reduce risk through measures such as multi-factor authentication and maintaining offline backups.
Matt Broersma is a long standing tech freelance, who has worked for Ziff-Davis, ZDnet and other leading publications
EU faults Apple for blaming Siri delay on DMA, says tech giant failed to propose…
Super Micro to raise funds through equity transactions to purchase components, equipment to fulfil high-end…
Mississippi residents file class-action lawsuit against xAI, parent SpaceX over Colossus turbines that cause near-constant…
Fund managers lead massive credit round to fund Anthropic's purchase of Google-developed chips from Broadcom,…
parent Meta says NSO Group violates court order barring it from targeting WhatsApp users…
US Defence Department adds major Chinese tech firms to list designating them as military entities,…
The full story
This article is one source in a clustered incident — the cluster page carries the summary, timeline and every other outlet covering it.
