Over the weekend, hundreds of school websites were hacked by ISIS, the Tucson Unified School District included. The district was hacked Saturday night, and it lasted several hours.  The hackers plastered Islamic and possibly pro-ISIS messages on it. A small file was injected into a root of one of the SchoolDesk websites, which redirected 800 school and district websites to a YouTube page that contained an audible Arabic message, and a picture of Saddam Hussein. The websites and website content is now secured and unaltered, and is currently working without issue.  SchoolDesk is actively working with local federal agencies to track the source, and they are making efforts to strengthen their website and prevent anything like this from happening again.

Staff with TUSD released the following statement to Tucson News Now Monday, Nov. 6:

“Our team will be working diligently to continue to strengthen our network, websites and all sources of access to prevent such activities from occurring again.  However, it should also be noted that these website intrusions were not limited to SchoolDesk exclusively, and were experienced by many other companies, non-profit organizations, as well as private, state and even federal websites.”