Grain Valley School District investigates cyberattack

GRAIN VALLEY, Mo. — The Grain Valley School District confirms it is investigating a cyberattack.

“Basically what first went down was the printers,” student Nathan Rathmann said Wednesday about how his last three days have changed in school. “Then throughout the day, we had buggy Wi-Fi. Our power school went completely down, so they had to start taking our attendance by paper. It was depressing and not fun.” 

Rathman said teachers had to print things from home, so there’s been more writing so far this week on paper as opposed to typing. He said things got frustrating after a while.

“I got so used to doing all the online schoolwork that whenever they said, ‘Ah we’re going to do it all on paper today.’ I was like, ‘Ah, you gotta be kidding me.’ It was not very fun,” he said.

In a letter sent to families Tuesday, the district said it began investigating when the district experienced technical difficulties. The issues disrupted certain computer systems.

We began an investigation and determined that we were the victim of a cyber-attack that used malware to encrypt certain systems. We are working diligently with third-party forensic specialists to investigate the incident, confirm its impact on our systems, and restore full functionality to our systems as soon as possible.

Grain Valley School District

A spokesperson for the school district said Wednesday investigators do not believe that malware breached the district’s system. They also don’t believe hackers got ahold of anyone’s personal information through the attack.

She said the district’s now in a recovery mode. The internet was back on Wednesday, so were security cameras, and the phone systems were back on in all but one of their buildings. ​A lot of the printers at the school are still down though.

Families with questions or information about the attack are asked to email the district at news@gvr5.net.