A cyber incident disrupted phone service across Alaska’s North Slope Borough School District, forcing schools to give families temporary cellphone numbers. Classes continued in person.
The district’s technology department discovered the districtwide outage Sept. 8. Staff initially suspected a malfunctioning server, but an investigation found a cybersecurity incident, according to an Oct. 5 notification letter.
The district limited some network systems and brought in outside cybersecurity specialists, according to its Sept. 9 public notice.
“Some school phone services may be temporarily unavailable or unreliable,” the district said in a Sept. 11 notice. It gave families temporary cellphone numbers for four Utqiaġvik schools and said it was still restoring communications in seven other communities.
The district later warned that personal information may have been accessed and offered free identity monitoring to every student and staff member. It has not disclosed how many people, if any, were affected.
The Oct. 5 letter listed Social Security numbers, driver’s license information, benefit and insurance information and limited medical information among the employee data the district ordinarily holds. It did not specify which records, if any, were accessed.
The district said it had found no evidence that employee information was misused or published on the dark web.
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A Sept. 27 listing on INC Ransom’s disclosure site names nsbsd.org, the district’s website. The district has not identified an attacker, and the listing does not establish that the group caused the phone outage, encrypted systems or obtained district data.
During a September incident at Weld Re-8 School District in Colorado, local network services failed while cloud services remained available. North Slope also said its cloud finance system was unaffected.
The district said it was cooperating with the FBI and North Slope Borough police. Operations had returned to normal by Oct. 5; it did not give a date when phone service was restored.
