Hackers breach security cameras at Sandy Hook School
NEWTOWN — Leaders sought to assure parents and teachers that a breach of security cameras at Sandy Hook School and other classroom buildings earlier this week did not put students and staff at risk.
“Our security plan doesn’t just involve surveillance cameras,” said Dan Rosenthal, the town’s top elected leader. “We have armed security guards at all our schools, so while I am disappointed, I am not concerned that there is any security weakness in our system.”
Schools Superintendent Lorrie Rodrigue said ‘additional security measures have been added’ to the school district’s cloudbased security camera system run by Verkada, a California startup whose clients include hospitals, jails, nonprofits and the newly built Newtown police headquarters.
“We feel confident that this incident has not jeopardized the safety of our students or our staff,” Rodrigue said.
Leaders were reacting to a Wednesday announcement by Verkada that hackers attacked “a server used by our support team to perform bulk maintenance operations on customer cameras,” on Sunday, gaining access to “video and image data from a limited number of cameras from a subset of client organizations,” among other data.
The hackers “maintained access until approximately noon (Pacific time) on March 9, 2021...” and “obtained credentials that allowed them to bypass our authorization system, including two-factor authentication,” Verkada said.
Verkada said the FBI was involved in the investigation. The FBI office in New Haven did not immediately return a call for comment on Thursday.
Rosenthal said it remained to be investigated what the hackers had access to and what value that access had.
The Associated Press reported that a member of a group claiming responsibility for the hack described the group as “not backed by any nations or capital but instead backed by a desire for fun…and a better world.”
Rosenthal said Verkada’s contract with the school district and the police department would be re-evaluated. The company installed cameras at Newtown’s seven schools as part of a 2019 upgrade. The $15 million police department headquarters opened late last year.
“We will have to figure out what happened and satisfy ourselves about Verkada’s infrastructure and security, how this happened, and whether they had the right controls in place to prevent it,” Rosenthal said.
Security in Newtown has been a priority since 2012, when a gunman shot his way into a locked Sandy Hook School and killed 20 first-graders and six educators.