One Friday in July, just before the start of the school year, Caroline Sice was out to lunch with a friend when she got an alarming call from a colleague. Lanesend Primary — a school on the Isle of Wight in the U.K., where Sice has been head teacher for 12 years — had been hit by a ransomware attack. All of the information stored on its network was completely inaccessible.

“Everything had been encrypted,” said Sice. “All the children’s records, staff records, all the teaching and learning, all the data, all the finances, internet. Everything.”

Lanesend Primary, which serves roughly 400 students, aged four to 11 years old, had experienced IT problems the day before. Staff couldn’t access their emails or remotely log into the school’s systems. Sice was aware of the issues, but attributed them to routine maintenance. “I really, really hadn’t thought that it would be a cyber attack,” she said.

For a moment, it felt like the matter was under control. But, as the scale of the problem became clearer, she started to lose hope. “Over the weekend, it got heavier and heavier and heavier,” she said. “Suddenly, it begins to dawn on you that you’ve got nothing. Nothing. All the lesson plans. Oh my goodness, how are the teachers going to respond? This is years and years of their work, years of learning. The more you thought of it, the bigger and bigger it grew.”

The hackers also encrypted the backups of all of the data for Lanesend Primary and the five other schools, which meant the easiest way to resolve the problem was off the table. Staff would have to recreate all of the schools’ records from scratch.

Ultimately, Sice and the headteachers of the other affected schools made the decision to delay the start of classes by three days, to allow staff time to regroup and bring students back safely amid the pandemic. For the first six weeks of school, everything was done on paper.“

Kids are now back at their desks, but the upheaval caused by the attack is far from over. Some of the problems have been minor, like supplies not being delivered because schools could not pay bills after losing all of their financial information. Other things were unexpected. Hackers encrypted access to the digitized bells in one of the secondary school’s buildings, so for the first three weeks of classes, they rang at random intervals. Because the schools lost all their contact lists and access to email, the IWEF couldn’t inform parents or staff that the systems were down and the start of term would be delayed, so a notice was put out in the local paper.

Some of the lost data was more important and more laborious to reassemble. The medical information of staff and students, financial records, payroll details, staff background checks — all of it was gone and none of it has been decrypted.

On top of all the administrative challenges created by the ransomware attack, Caroline Sice is concerned teachers who lost lesson plans that they had devised will be forced to turn to a more rote curriculum.

“We’re a very creative school,” she said. “We learn from what interests the children. So every year is different. I’m worried that actually what they’ll now pull on is just whatever they can get rather than it being what was really made for the children.”

Lanesend has about a dozen students with special needs, who have individual education, health and care plans, a government program to identify a child’s needs and ensure that they are met. It took three weeks, even with two people working on it, to recreate the learning plans for each of those students.

Rebuilding databases, lesson plans and records will take hundreds of hours, on top of staff’s other responsibilities. The emotional toll is weighing on Sice and the team at Lanesend Primary. The school’s head of finance resigned recently, owing to stress. Sice says that she is trying to maintain a brave face for the children, but that she has trouble sleeping at night.

“As head teacher, I’ve done some pretty tough things. This is the toughest. And it’s come on the back of Covid,” she said. “It’s challenging because it’s out of my control. It’s out of my expertise. And I’m relying on other people to try and get it back together. I would say it’s bent me towards breaking.”

Source: https://www.codastory.com/disinformation/ransomware-schools/

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