Groton schools working with authorities following last week's cyberattack
Feb. 6—GROTON — The school district's director of technology said he is making sure the district is working with the appropriate authorities following a cyberattack on the district network last week.
Groton Public Schools' Director of Technology Clint Kennedy gave an update at Monday's Board of Education meeting on the district-wide internet outage last Thursday.
He said on the morning of Feb. 1, the school system suffered an attack on its network. He was alerted at 6:30 that morning that one school did not have internet access, which he thought was unusual. He said there is a monitoring system on internet access coming into the district as well as all the individual schools.
Kennedy said he immediately called the network manager, and they started to dissect what was going on. They figured out about 20 to 25 minutes later that the district was the victim of an attack.
"We immediately jumped into what eventually got us back up and running in a very quick short order," he said, compared to similar events in the past in Hartford, East Lyme and Stonington.
"We had a disaster recovery plan in place, and it worked," he said.
Kennedy said it didn't work 100% because internet service was restored to only 90% to 95% about six hours later.
"But we were up, and we threw that plan into place and it worked," he said.
He said the district's systems are now up and running.
Kennedy said he is working with local police, the Department of Homeland Security and the district's technology vendor. He also is working with two groups through the district's cybersecurity insurance: one for forensics work and one for legal counsel guiding the district on its roles and responsibilities.
He said he was not going to share more details publicly due to the sensitivity of the topic.
