Chaotic week for Separate School Board after email system hacked
Posted May 26, 2012 8:28 am.
This article is more than 5 years old.
A hacker in Eastern China caused quite a few headaches for staff and administrators at the Calgary Catholic School Board this week.
The hacker managed to infiltrate the school district’s email system — after convincing a teacher he was a school board IT specialist and getting the instructor’s username and password — then sending out 150,000 spam emails over the long weekend.
The spamming attack prompted international spam monitors to blacklist the school division’s domain address, effectively shutting down the school system’s email network.
The person in charge of infrastructure for the separate school board, John Schutte, tells the Calgary Herald about half of the internet was inaccessible to school board employees and it put a severe crimp in day-to-day business operations. Everything from plumbing repairs to orders for paper were affected.
How significant was the breach?
The separate school board handles about seven million pieces of e-mail each month.
The week-long blacklisting by spam monitors was finally lifted Friday.
