BC college warns students and staff of potential data breach

A cyberattack launched against Okanagan College in Kelowna, BC not only managed to disable campus network services, but officials have also warned that the attack may have also resulted in stolen personal information.

On Wednesday, college president Neil Fassina issued a statement explaining that the institution’s IT services team discovered a cyberattack attempt earlier this week during routine surveillance. Said attack, which was launched by an “unrecognized external agent,” forced the college IT team to shut down and disable network access across all of Okanagan College’s campuses in Kelowna, Vernon, Penticton and Salmon Arm.

“The outage has impacted our public website and learning management site Moodle. It has impacted our ability to send user emails to our students and staff,” explained Fassina.

The president added that the IT team is investigating the incident with the help of outside cybersecurity experts.

Fassina also told CBC News that the college is working hard to restore access to network services, but could not say for how long the system would be down.

“As much as I’d love to be able to say it’s got a definitive timeline on it, that is not something I can provide at this time,” he said.

The Huron-Superior Catholic District School Board in Ontario also recently suffered a cyberattack which may have potentially exposed the personal information of employees. According to the school board, the cyber attackers were “likely able to steal” employee data such as social security numbers, birthdates, compensation and banking details from 2019 to 2022.