Students, teachers, and other staff were told to disconnect from the school WiFi and shut down their computers following an announcement of a cyber attack at Hercules High School on September 27th. Within a day, HHS and other district guests, including eight Information Technology members, discovered the cause of the problem and revealed that it was not a cyber attack.
“The school was not being hacked,” former librarian Melanie Perkins said. “Around 10:00 in the morning on [September 27th], weird reports [concerning the tablets] were coming from both the middle school and the high school.”
In substitute teacher
Gwen Wynn’s class, on the middle school side, and Spanish teacher Virginia Hernandez’s class on the high school, tablets were reported as being frozen with an image of either a smiling hockey player, a polar bear, or a wolf on them. Shortly afterwards, more classes called to report the same incidents occurring.
Perkins contacted both the help desk and the school administration, including Principal Paul Mansingh, and sent an email to Superintendent for Technology Mary Phillips. However, when Phillips did not respond right away, Perkins and Middle School Librarian Angela Anthony notified both campuses to disconnect from the WiFi and shut down their computers.
“I think that it was an accident,” Perkins said regarding the frozen images on tablet screens.
She went on to explain that the incident was related to a new program that the district launched in October, called LANschool, that allows teachers to see what students in their classrooms are viewing on their tablets at any given time. She added that the program also allows teachers to send an image to every Lenovo computer with the program and freeze it on the screens.
Both Perkins and IT believe that a teacher that did not know how to work the program was tampering with its settings and inadvertently captured an image onto every tablet with the program. The district is trying to find out who this mystery teacher is; however, with 15 schools enabling the application, it is hard to track.
“I don’t think there was any delay,” Perkins said regarding the school’s response to the threat of a cyber attack. “The main thing you need to do [when presented with a possible threat] is shut everything down, [so it was a] timely call.”
The tablets are safe to presently use anywhere. Perkins acknowledged that incidents like this may happen again, but now that HHS is aware of the issue, its students and staff will not have to follow the same protocol to resolve it.
“We want everyone to be safe online, both students and teachers,” Perkins said. “There are bad people in the world who want to do bad things online, so [when events like this occur], it’s a safety issue.”
Perkins explained that there have been link activated viruses in the school before in the form of misleading emails. However, she made sure to address that those viruses were only activated because some teachers were tricked by the faulty links, and that the district’s information is protected by Google, which is highly secure, according to Perkins.
“Be vigilant,” Perkins said of using the internet and other electronic devices. “Realize that billions of others use [them] at the same time. Most are honest, good people, but some are not.”
If something doesn’t seem right, pay attention and tell somebody, Perkins said. It is the student’s responsibility to let teachers know if something weird happens.