Cyberattack disrupts education at Grafton High

A cyberattack on the Grafton schools network caused service outages at Grafton High School and considerable frustration for students, teachers, and parents.

The outage came a time when the ongoing COVID-19 pandemic is making education highly dependent on Internet access. The problems have escalated since last week.

“We confirmed with our service provider that the district has been experiencing an ongoing distributed denial-of-service (DDoS) attack,” Superintendent of Schools Jay Cummings wrote in an email to parents this week.

A DDoS attack is a malicious attempt to disrupt traffic on a server, service or network by overwhelming the target with a flood of internet traffic. Grafton joins a giant list of school systems targeted with such attacks, including a recent problem in the town of Sandwich.

Cummings said the school district’s service provider has put measures in place that should prevent attacks from continuing.

“We are hopeful that the measures put in place will successfully address the issues and result in restored network stability,” Cummings wrote.