TALLAHASSEE, Fla. – The Department of Education is blaming cyberattacks for the problems with last week's Florida Standards Assessment testing and said the Florida Department of Law Enforcement is investigating.
Education Commissioner Pam Stewart and FDLE Commissioner Rick Swearingen announced Monday that the problem was identified Thursday as a denial-of-service attack.
Problems logging in or with computers freezing up left thousands of students unable to complete the writing portion of the test for middle and high school students. The problem began last Monday, but continued well into the week for several school districts across the state, including Duval, St. Johns and Clay.
"While most Florida students are continuing to test successfully, we now know that some of the delays in testing late last week were due to cyberattacks on our testing system operated by American Institutes for Research," Stewart said.
AIR accepted full responsibility and concluded that an update it performed had inadvertently resulted in the delays.
"The department has been working with FDLE since last Thursday when we were notified about the problem," Stewart said Monday. "We will continue to provide them with any information possible to ensure they identify the bad actors and hold them accountable to the fullest extent of the law."
Stewart said they are working with the vendor on the problem, which reported that while some of the test contents were lost, no student data was compromised.
Cyber security expert Chris Hamer said that determining the motive is difficult and this particular type of attack is not cheap. Hackers will pay five to ten thousand dollars an hour to have an illegal company carry out the attack or use a massive amount of computers on their own for this to happen.
"It doesn't make sense for a motivated attack. If a student was launching it, the repercussions for getting caught are far greater then just the inconvenience of having to take a test. If it's some politically motivated thing where they think the test is that bad, they have ponied up a lot of money to launch this kind of attack," said Hamer.
"We know that we have to remain vigilant to ensure all our testing vendors protect students' testing results and personal information at all times," Stewart said.
"FDLE's Tallahassee Cyber-Crimes Squad began working with the Department of Education on Thursday to determine where these attacks are coming from and to identify suspects," said FDLE Commissioner Rick Swearingen. "This investigation is to be a priority for our Cyber-Crime Squad and we consulted with our counterparts at the FBI."
By approximately 8:30 a.m. Thursday, the problem had subsided and the districts that continued were able to test successfully for the rest of the day. AIR confirmed the cause of this issue was a cyber-attack on the logon server.
Despite these issues, the DOE reported that 397,352 students completed the computer-based writing component in the first week of testing. That represents 60 percent of those registered to take the test.
The second week of testing is underway.