Maricopa Community Colleges begin bringing resources back online after cyber attack

MARICOPA COUNTY, Ariz. - It was a rough week for Maricopa County Community Colleges after administrators detected suspicious activity on their servers and now parents and students are concerned about hackers getting access to personal information.

However, on March 22, school officials said no information appears to have been compromised.

"Although the forensic investigation is ongoing, MCCCD has not found any evidence that student or employee information, such as social security numbers, educational information or financial data was compromised at this time," a news release read.

School officials reported suspicious activity on March 16 and that’s when they followed incident response protocols — disconnecting networks at their 10 campuses.

They say they're taking this seriously enlisting the help of independent forensic specialists. They're also working with students to make accommodations on a course-by-course basis as several essential websites students use to complete coursework are down.

This is not the first time the college system has been hacked. This also happened back in 2013 when hackers exposed personal information, including the banking information of two million people.

The 2013 investigation cost Maricopa Community Colleges millions of dollars.

A parent of a Chandler-Gilbert Community College student said of the hacking, "My son’s happy he gets another week off but the concern is what information these people will have access to, credit cards, social security information, all of our information that is in that system."

Hacking school systems is certainly not a new thing, according to data doctor Ken Colburn. In fact, he says it’s becoming all too common.

"There’s a lot of advantages for them when they target schools. For one, there is a plethora of information, schools keeping information from their students and faculty going back 20, 30 years," Colburn said.

Information like social security and credit card numbers give hackers the opportunity to commit ID fraud or to demand a ransom for access to accounts or servers.

"They encrypt or basically get ahold of very important files, preventing the school from using them," Colburn said.

Now that resources are beginning to get back online, the schools will implement additional safety measures.

"As we begin to incrementally bring systems online following a deliberate and methodical process, faculty and staff will be prompted to implement additional security controls, including two-factor authentication. MCCCD will also provide access to free antivirus software that can be installed on all faculty, staff and student personal devices," a news release read.

For more information on the hack, visit this link.