Virginia High School Suffers Outage After Malware Infects Systems
Grassfield High School located in Chesapeake, Virginia, has suffered a cyber attack, leaving various computers utterly useless. According to school officials, a staff member clicked on a phishing email which infected their computer, as well as others on the network. At this time, the infection is not system-wide but has impacted a few different school divisions. There are also concerns anything connected to the school’s website could also be infected, including student’s personal devices.
Any of Grassfield High School’s classes that rely heavily on computers, like marketing or economics struggled to keep up with the class curriculum. Teachers have also been unable to update student grades during the outage.
The outage has been managed by the school’s IT department, and they are working diligently to get everything functioning at full capacity. In the meantime, school officials have notified the student’s parents of the incident. An excerpt from the letter they sent home with students last Friday can be found below, provided by WTKR News.
“We appreciate the flexibility and patience of our staff and students, and the efforts of the IT department who worked tirelessly to contain and eradicate the virus. In addition, we are proud of the creativity, patience, and collaboration our staff has exhibited. They modified lessons in order to continue to provide quality instruction and remain on track with our pacing guides.
At Grassfield High School, we are committed to the digital safety of our students, faculty, and staff and we will continue to provide high quality instruction despite any technological barriers.”
