The headteacher of Haylands Primary School has written to all parents alerting them of a potential data breach.
The school became aware of a cyber attack this week and although they don’t believe the event will have any impact on parents or pupils, it has been reported to the police and the school has self-reported the incident to the Information Commissioner’s Office.
Services hacked
Lisa Nicolson, Headteacher at Haylands Primary School said,
“Yesterday we sent a letter to our parents alerting them that we had we become aware of a malware virus and unauthorised log-ins to our servers at the school.”
She went on to say,
“We have taken the necessary steps to remove the malware and shut down the avenue through which the unauthorised logins, or ‘hacks’, were made. Our servers are again secure and we have reported this criminal activity to the Police.”
Personal data could have been accessed
The headteacher continued,
“At present, we cannot rule out the possibility that personal information such as names, dates of birth, addresses and general school records might have been accessed, although we currently have no evidence that they were accessed in any way. Because of the possible data access, we have also self-reported this incident to the Information Commissioner’s Office.”
Ms Nicholson finished by saying,
Image: jousch under CC BY 2.0“Whilst we do not believe that this event will have any impact on our parents or pupils and the disruption to our systems was minimised, due to the virus protection that we had in place, I do feel a real sense of sadness that anyone would choose to attack a primary school in this way.”
