Hacked

Published 6:00 am Tuesday, November 7, 2017

Websites for the Iberia Parish School Board and St. Martin Parish School Board were defaced early Monday morning by a pro-Islamic State hacker group.

The hackers redesigned the sites by accessing SchoolDesk, a Georgia-based host provider that both school systems utilize, to depict a picture of Sadaam Hussein and the message “There is no God but God. Mohammad is the prophet of God,” followed by several question marks.

Iberia and St. Martin reportedly are just two of more than 800 school board sites affected by the hack.

However, superintendents for each school system said the breach had no effect on internal systems. They also said no employee or student information was accessed by the hacker group.

Iberia Parish Superintendent of Schools Dale Henderson said he received a call from the Iberia Parish Sheriff’s Office at about 3:50 a.m. Monday alerting him that someone had hacked into the system. Henderson said the hacker group was unable to break through the firewall for the system.

Technicians for both systems ultimately repaired the homepages for Iberia and St. Martin. 

“By 6:30 this morning everything was done and restored,” Henderson said Monday afternoon. “There was no breach of personal information, which is always the first thing you worry about when there’s a hack.”

St. Martin School Board Superintendent Lottie Beebe said she was informed by the IPSO of the situation at 4:30 a.m. and by 7 a.m. the situation had been resolved.

The hack supposedly was conducted by a pro-ISIS group called Team System DZ. The group had taken responsibility for hacking several government websites earlier this year in Ohio, Maryland and New York, as well as federal websites. Some of the text in those incidents threatened President Donald Trump and supported the Islamic State.

Both Henderson and Beebe said the incident was off-putting, but both are relieved that there are no serious ramifications to the hack.

“I’ve been reassured by our computer technicians that the hackers didnt obtain any impact student information or any personal information,” Beebe said.

In a prepared statement, SchoolDesk said it is requiring all affected users to reset their passwords. The company is working with local, state and federal law enforcement agencies including the FBI on tracking the source for the website intrusions as well. 

“Our team will be working diligently to continue to strengthen our network, websites and all sources of access to prevent such activities from occurring again,” according to the statement.  

“However, it should also be noted that these website intrusions were not limited to SchoolDesk exclusively, and were experienced by many other companies, non-profit organizations, as well as private, state and even federal websites.”