Districts report improved access after cyberattack

Access to online student information has been mostly restored in three of Oklahoma’s largest school districts following a cyberattack, officials said Tuesday.

Oklahoma City Public Schools, Edmond Public Schools and Moore Public Schools were affected to varying degrees by the attack, which made it difficult if not impossible for parents, teachers and school administrators to obtain the information.

On Sunday, the Oklahoma City district reported a “denial of service” attack on Infinite Campus, which houses the district’s parent portal.

Officials said the student information system was not “hacked” and no student information was stolen.

Eric Hileman, the district’s information technology director, said the system was either unresponsive or extremely slow on Sept. 17 and Sept. 18.

“Since Friday we have noticed marked improvement in service quality,” Hileman said Tuesday. “People are being served faster ... and they’re able to connect to the service.”

Distributed Denial of Service attacks occur when a computer network is intentionally flooded with data sent simultaneously from compromised computers. The attack is one of the most common ways for a website to be disrupted, Hileman said.

“It happens all the time,” he said.

Infinite Campus serves 7.8 million students in 45 states, according to the company’s website.

In a Sept. 21 Facebook post, Infinite Campus said its data centers are frequently “under attack from a variety of sources.”

“The attack this week is different; its volume is 50 times greater and the duration is already 100 times longer than anything we’ve experienced before,” the company said. “To be clear, this is not a data breach and we have not been hacked; attacks like this limit our customers’ ability to reach our applications.”

In the post, the company said the latest series of attacks began Sept. 17 and included multiple customers and data centers.

“Homeland Security is now involved and we’ve hired additional security experts to assure all data is safe and to track down the attack perpetrators.”

The Edmond and Moore districts also use Infinite Campus to manage their student information systems.

Both districts experienced disruptions and delays, officials said.

“The problem peaked Friday. It is much better today,” Edmond Public Schools spokeswoman Susan Parks-Schlepp said. “The amount and length of delays have been reduced to about half a dozen today. Each delay has lasted just a couple of minutes.”

Dustin Horstkoetter, director of safety and security for Moore Public Schools, said some district staff members couldn’t log on to Infinite Campus on Sept. 18.

The issue was “taken care of that same day,” Horstkoetter said in a text.

“Just that one day,” he said. “No parent issues that we were made aware of. During the issues, the only problem was not being able to log on consistently.

“If you tried several times, sometimes it let you in. Sometimes not. It didn’t cause much of an issue with us, though.”