BBC. Cancelled lessons and snaking lunchtime queues are among the ways pupils are being affected by an increasing number of cyber attacks on schools.
New figures from the Information Commissioner's Office show 347 cyber incidents were reported in the education and childcare sector in 2023 - an increase of 55% on 2022.
Government data suggests most schools and colleges have identified a cyber-security breach in the past year.
The Department for Education says it has a dedicated response team available to advise schools when that happens.
Two school trusts in the East Midlands were targeted in separate attacks within days of each other earlier this year.
Embrace Multi-Academy Trust CEO Sharon Mullins says her schools are still feeling the effects of the attack, which happened just before Easter.
Staff at Brockington College, in Leicester, were first alerted to the breach when they saw their mouse cursors moving remotely across their screens, with files already open on the computers, when they first logged on at the start of the school day.
Within 30 minutes, she had ordered all of the trust's nine schools to take all of their systems offline.
Suddenly, everything from pupil registers to fire safety had to be done on paper, as staff worked day and night over the holidays to get the systems back online safely.
Brockington's school librarian Elizabeth Elliott says she is now chasing more than 100 overdue books after losing access to her online records.
Even the school's catering facilities were affected, with the computer systems responsible for taking payments for school lunches also taken offline.
Isaac, in Year 9, says his homework is still affected two months on from the attack, as the app they use is not yet fully back online.
The type of cyber attack which increased most across all sectors between the end of 2022 and 2023, according to the ICO, was ransomware, incidents of which increased by 170%. During a ransomware attack, hackers block access to a school's computer records, including sensitive personal data, and demand money while threatening to publish them online.
Often the attacks are committed by organised criminal gangs based in foreign countries.
Ms Mullins now says she wants school leaders to talk more openly about how to deal with such incidents.
A few miles away, in South Derbyshire, the de Ferrers Trust was targeted by a near-simultaneous but separate cyber attack which forced two of its schools to close.
Paul Alberry, CEO of Secure Schools, said the concept of managing cyber-security risk is fairly new to most schools.
He said school leadership teams, as well as specialist IT staff, should all be involved and be familiar with what to do in the event of a cyber attack.
Stretched school budgets limit how much trusts can invest in cyber-security defences to keep hackers out, he said.
Similar resources are available on the National Cyber Security Centre's webpage for schools.
This Cyber News was published on www.bbc.com. Publication date: Mon, 13 May 2024 00:44:05 +0000