Rimsie McConiga
Special to the Citizen
Platte County School District tech department member Andy Hall spoke about the recent hacking of computers in the school district and the tech department’s unified response to the malware problem during the board meeting on Thursday, Sept. 19.
Assistant Superintendent Dr. Mike Brown introduced the tech team.
“When teams and individuals face adversity there are basically two paths you could take,” Brown said. “One path where you kind of make excuses for everything. You can let it kind of pull your team apart and let it hurt the organization. You can make excuses or you can own the problem.”
He said the tech team came together under adversity and faced it and made it their priority to give the people that they serve confidence that the problem would be solved.
“These guys worked long, tireless hours late at night and into the morning and really stayed together during the whole thing and helped us remain confident,” Brown said.
When Hall took the podium he described the problems the hacking caused at the end of August.
“We had a piece of malware in our network that came in right as we were leaving work,” Hall said. “We caught it but it created a big challenge for us. Basically we came in and there were little ransom notes all over the place that said ‘if you want your information back email us and we will tell you how many Bitcoins we want you to release.’”
Hall said Dwayne Lemasters took charge of how the team should tackle the problem.
“Calls started coming in and people were saying, ‘hey where’s my home directory’ and poor Leah Kelley had to answer all the phone calls and was incredibly diplomatic,” Hall said. “Then Tanner Ruwe spearheaded going out and getting into individual computers and making sure they were all safe.”
Three new staff members were in the tech department when the hacking occurred. Leah Kunzler and Zakry Schneeflock had only been in their new jobs for one day.
“They just jumped right in and we ended up having to check every computer in the district and scan it to make sure it was clean,” Hall said. “We got things running again and we were very proud of how quickly our team was able to do that.”
Hall said to put it in perspective Flagstaff, Ariz., had a similar incident recently that shut down the school for two days.
“There’s a school district in Illinois that this happened to two weeks ago and the phones still are not functioning,” Hall said. “This is a national epidemic hitting small community schools and hospitals. I think we were pretty lucky on how it played out here.”
The first thing the team did was inspect the servers to see which ones were hit. They looked at the financial servers first. The tech department members are still working on recovering some things. Hall said he knew teachers were eager to get their phone directories and they would be going out soon.
Hall said they are working with some very intelligent people to keep this from happening again.
“Basically if you talk to the FBI, if you talk to any security experts they will tell you not to engage with the people doing this for two reasons,” Hall said. “There’s no face-to-face contact, it’s all through email. We know this came from Russia. There’s no guarantees. We don’t send them money and we don’t hear from them again, and if you fund those operations they have an opportunity to grow, so every credible source I talk to says not to even bother, and that’s the path we took.”
All three sites where the school district had backed up their data were hit and the ransomware had managed to encrypt every site. Hall said the tech team has learned a lot and they are reviewing policies to prevent future attacks.
The team members were each given a certificate and $25 Pirate Bucks for Pirate gear. They were also the first signers of the 2019 Shiver Me Timbers oars.
OTHER NEWS
Bids for new computers for the high school business lab were discussed. The bids are for 31 computers and 32 monitors. This is partially funded by a state grant. The bids passed with a unanimous vote.
Next semester elementary school principals will give an update on school improvement plans and in the following months the middle school and high school principals and the Northland Career Center will give their updates.
In October, the results summary will come out. It used to be called the assessment summary but it’s no longer called that because it includes all the results from surveys.
Students in the Platte County School District continue to score above the state average in math. Eighth grade math students have had almost a 10% increase in scores.
In closed session, the board approved the resignation of custodians Marcia Thomas, Beverly Forsberg and Sarah Bruley; paraprofessionals Amanda Deason and Dianne Douglas; and lunch monitors Trudi Brady and Melissa Jenks.
Roberta Deeny, a high school office supervisor, announced her retirement effective Sept. 27.
Siegrist second grade teacher Michele Stoway announced her resignation effective May 20, 2020.
Daphne Foster was hired as a bus driver.