Dubai: With no institution, government safe from Cyber attacks, hackers a British school in Dubai is the new victim of these anonymous hackers.
The school has warned parents about a cyber attack on its network last week, Gulfnews reports.
It has also assured strict action will be taken to protect the privacy of the student and parent information.
The Dubai British School Jumeirah Park (DBS JP) is run by Taaleem education group in Dubai.
Communications Consultant with education group Clive Pierrepont addressing the issue said, “We communicated the incident in a detailed statement to parents last week. The phishing attack was one of many that are unfortunately growing more prevalent in our ever connected, online lives. The attackers leveraged a tactic known as ‘password spraying’, a technique that exploits weak passwords and managed to compromise a number of staff email accounts.”
He further added that, “The incident was recognised and dealt with within hours of the failed attack. The hackers gained very limited access, and our system resisted further attempts to circumvent the additional layers of our network security. The attack did not result in any data breaches.”
His crucial advise to other schools to avoid any similar incident was: “We encourage all schools to enforce strong passwords and two factor authentication (2FA) within their organisations.”
The data breach was clearly dealt with within hours of hackers compromising the accounts posing as staff.
The school’s IT department at DBS JP had identified and re-set all the compromised accounts, blocked ambiguous URL links and attackers’ IPs from their systems.
The school has also issued a fake alert warning to parents and said it is a part of a phishing scam and advised them to delete suspicious messages and avoid clicking any links.